The official rate counts one narrow kind of joblessness. AURmetric combines public labor data with a proprietary estimation engine — informal labor, underemployment, hidden unemployment — into one benchmark index for the real state of work, by county and industry. A standard for labor the way Case-Shiller is for housing.
Outlined states have county-level detail — click one to drill in. (7 states loaded; full national coverage needs a free BLS API key.)
AURmetric's estimation engine is built to see the workers official surveys undercount or miss — the difference between a number and the truth.
People, not paychecks. Records are keyed to one person, so multiple jobs never inflate employment and a formal + cash worker is counted once.
Off-the-books and cash work modeled from income-vs-spending gaps and survey signals — the economy official payroll data can't see.
Anonymous survey design and residual demographic methods estimate labor-force participation among workers reluctant to appear in official records.
Part-timers who want full-time, and skilled workers in low-wage roles, tracked separately instead of hidden inside "employed."
Discouraged and marginally attached workers who dropped out of the labor force — and so vanish from U-3 — are counted back in.
Every estimate is reconciled across independent sources with inverse-variance weighting; disagreement widens the published band instead of being hidden.
Public inputs go in; a reconciled, person-level labor dataset comes out. The combination — and the informal/undocumented estimation on top — is the proprietary asset. Live is running on real public data today; In build is the modeling layer in development.
National · state · county · industry, each with an uncertainty band and a full source trail.
The labor force decomposed into mutually exclusive groups. The four warm slices are the underutilized — together they are the actual rate. Illustrative national composition
Every major market has one defining index. Labor's headline number is the one everyone quotes and no one fully trusts. AURmetric is built to be the number they trust instead.
Turned messy home sales into the benchmark that prices the market. AURmetric does the same for labor slack.
A single survey-based number markets move on. The AURmetric Index is that signal for the labor market.
Proof a well-built index becomes essential infrastructure. Underemployment is the missing labor equivalent.
The national and state maps are open to everyone. Create a free account to unlock full county-level detail — actual unemployment rates, industry pay, job demand, and lost economic potential. No payment, no card.
The official U-3 rate — national, annual average. Use the range buttons to go further back; the series runs to 1948. This is the number everyone quotes; AURmetric exists because it leaves out informal, discouraged, and underemployed workers.
Honest status: this is a working preview. The live layer is genuine public data. The IRS-statistics integration, Census microdata pipeline, and proprietary household survey are the build-out that turns the modeled layers into measured ones — they are described as designed, not claimed as running. No number tagged Modeled or Illustrative should be cited as a measured statistic. Sources: BLS alternative measures, BLS Table A-15, USAFacts county rates (BLS).