As of August 2025, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recorded the national unemployment rate at 4.3 percent, marking a 0.10 percent increase from July and a 0.30 percent increase from the beginning of the year.
Approximately 7.4 million Americans are unemployed, but there has only been a net increase of 22,000 to the total “nonfarm payroll employment” statistics.
These statistics are consistent with a wave of layoffs that has carried on through all of 2025 so far, most notably in the federal employment sector.
California “accounted for 20.5 percent of the nation’s overall July gain,” according to the Employment Development Department (EDD)
The healthcare and social assistance industries experienced the largest decrease in the number of job openings, with a reduction of more than 180,000 positions.
Although the rate at which unemployment in the country is increasing, it has not yet risen to April 2020’s peak of 14.8 percent. The trend in BLS research has been indicating a steady increase in unemployment since October 2023, which peaked at 3.7 percent for the year.
The last time the country faced a similarly steady rise was in the two years leading up to the Great Recession, which peaked at 10 percent in October of 2009, following the largest housing market crash in U.S. history.
The circumstances surrounding the numbers are largely different this time around however, as there is no singular factor that contributes to current unemployment data.
In 2008, the housing market collapsed after being propped up by predatory lending practices like subprime mortgages offered by banking institutions to people who would end up defaulting or becoming delinquent on their loans due to adjustable interest rates.
According The Rise in Mortgage Defaults, published by the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) in 2008, “…by the second quarter of 2008, the share of seriously delinquent mortgages had surged to 4.5 percent. These delinquencies foreshadowed a sharp rise in foreclosures.”
Today, industries across the country that rely on imports are facing a litany of tariffs that are contributing to the rising inflation rate at a time when healthcare and housing costs are absurdly high and federally funded assistance programs and jobs are being slashed.
These industries have largely turned to layoffs to compensate for the rising cost of manufacture.
The average cost of a single-family home in the United States has experienced a sharp incline month-over-month according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) House Price Index, from approximately $275,000 in 2020 to more than $450,000 in 2025.
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