What AURmetric is, how it differs from the official rate, and how far to trust each number.
No. AURmetric is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics or any government agency. It is built on public government data — the live county and state unemployment rates come straight from the BLS Public Data API — but the benchmark itself, and especially the informal-labor extension, is ours.
The headline rate (U-3) counts one narrow kind of joblessness: people with no job who searched in the last four weeks. It excludes involuntary part-timers, discouraged workers who gave up looking, and anyone doing informal or unreported work.
AURmetric starts from U-6 — the broadest measure the government itself publishes — and extends it with an estimate of informal and undocumented labor, county by county. See the Methodology for the full definition.
The BLS publishes six alternative measures, U-1 through U-6. U-6 is the widest: it adds discouraged and marginally attached workers plus involuntary part-timers to the U-3 count. Starting from U-6 keeps AURmetric anchored to an official, reproducible number before the modeled informal layer is added on top.
Because unreported work cannot be counted directly — that's what makes it unreported. Rather than pretend to a precision that doesn't exist, AURmetric estimates the informal component three independent ways and reconciles them; the disagreement between the methods becomes the reported error band. A single exact figure for hidden labor would be dishonest.
Anything labeled Live on the dashboard is genuine public data (county and state U-3, the U-6 basis, the national history chart). Anything labeled Modeled or Illustrative is the estimation engine's output shown as a demonstration — the informal, undocumented, and "complete" (U-7/U-8) figures. Never cite a Modeled or Illustrative figure as an official statistic. Full breakdown on the Sources page.
Yes. Every county's official U-3 is pulled live from the BLS API, and each county's true rate is that U-3 lifted to a U-6 basis using published state (or national) U-6/U-3 ratios — all 50 states plus DC, roughly 3,130 counties. Industry pay and job-mix data come from the QCEW. The methodology for the U-6 lift is documented and reproducible.
The BLS releases county and state unemployment monthly; QCEW industry data is quarterly. The Sources page lists the cadence and current vintage for every dataset.
The national and state maps are open to everyone, no account needed. A free account (just your email — no card, no trial) unlocks full county-level detail. Signing in lets us serve the larger county dataset per request and keep the free national view fast.
Yes — see Cite this for the recommended citation. The underlying BLS and Census data are public; please attribute AURmetric for the derived true-rate methodology and cite the original agencies for the raw series.
AURmetric is an independent project. For press, partnerships, or data questions, email [email protected]. More on the About page.