AURmetric — the Actual Unemployment Rate Metric — is an independent labor-market benchmark that counts the workers the headline number leaves out.
The unemployment rate everyone quotes — U-3 — counts one narrow kind of joblessness: people without any job who searched in the last four weeks. It says nothing about the person working 15 hours who needs 40, the worker who gave up looking last month, or the millions doing cash work that never touches a payroll system.
"The most-quoted number about work is the one that trusts itself the least."
AURmetric starts from the official U-6 basis — the broadest measure the government publishes — and extends it with a transparent estimate of informal and undocumented labor, county by county. The result is one benchmark index for the real state of work: a standard for labor the way Case-Shiller is for housing.
People, not paychecks. Every record is keyed to one pseudonymous person. Someone with two jobs is one employed person, not two — the guard against inflating employment by counting paychecks.
A range, not a number. Unreported work cannot be counted directly, so the informal component is estimated three independent ways and reconciled. Disagreement between the methods becomes the reported error band. We publish ranges and label every modeled figure — never false precision.
Read exactly how it's built in the Methodology, and see every dataset on the Sources page.
AURmetric is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics or any government agency. Official series are reproduced unchanged for comparability, and every live figure traces to a public source. The national and state views are free to everyone; a free account unlocks full county-level detail.
Questions, data requests, press, or partnerships: [email protected].