Unemployment (LAUS)

Publisher

Organization

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Publisher’s dataset

Local Area Unemployment Statistics

File or API used

https://download.bls.gov/pub/time.series/la/la.data.19.Idaho

Retrieval script

scripts/fetch-bls-laus.py

Methodology

https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/lau/home.htm

Coverage

Geography

Nation, states, and Idaho's 44 counties

Time coverage

1976-2025 (states, US), 1990-2025 (Idaho counties), plus recent months

Update frequency

Monthly

Published

2026

Retrieved

September 8, 2026

License

The compiled file on this page is CC BY 4.0. The underlying records: Public domain. U.S. federal government work.

Measures

Caveats

• Idaho (state and all 44 counties) comes directly from BLS's own flat file, la.data.19.Idaho -- its annual figures are BLS's own published annual-average row (period M13), not an average this puller computed.
• Every other state, DC and the US came from a fallback source because BLS's flat-file host (download.bls.gov) returned a persistent Akamai bot-mitigation block (HTTP 403) to every request this puller tried, for every geography but the one Idaho file. The puller tries the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis's FRED (a free, keyless mirror of these exact BLS series, verified to match Idaho's own BLS values to the tenth of a point) first; if FRED is also unavailable it falls back to the registration-free BLS API v1, which never blocked this puller but caps an unregistered client to roughly the trailing 3 years of data regardless of the date range requested.
• This specific pull found FRED unavailable (fred.stlouisfed.org also began refusing connections partway through this session, after having worked earlier) and used the API v1 fallback, so the other 50 states, DC and the US carry only 2024 and 2025 (the complete calendar years inside that rolling window at pull time), not the full 1976-2025 span Idaho has. Re-running this puller when FRED is reachable again will backfill the full history for these geographies without any code change.
• For the other states/DC, the annual figure is this puller's own computed mean of the year's 12 (or, for 2025, 11) not-seasonally-adjusted monthly rates, the same method BLS itself uses; for the US it is BLS's own published annual-average (period M13) from series LNU04000000, used directly.
• 2025 is an 11-month average (October excluded) for every geography: the household survey underlying LAUS and the national CPS unemployment rate was not conducted in October 2025 because of that month's federal government shutdown (lapse in appropriations). BLS's own Idaho data carries this as footnote code G on the 2025 annual row; the same gap appears in every other state's and the US's monthly series.
• LAUS annual estimates are subject to revision the following spring when BLS re-benchmarks the state and area estimates against updated Current Population Survey and QCEW inputs; 2025 in particular is not yet through that cycle.
• Idaho Department of Labor (lmi.idaho.gov) republishes these same BLS LAUS figures for Idaho -- it is BLS's cooperating state agency for this program, not an independent survey -- so no disagreement with BLS's own numbers was found or is expected.

Pages built on this dataset

• Idaho unemployment rate

Downloads

CSV · JSON. 5,152 observations, 1976-2026.

How to cite

Understand Idaho, “Local Area Unemployment Statistics”, compiled from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Local Area Unemployment Statistics. Retrieved September 8, 2026. https://understandidaho.com/data/bls-laus/. CC BY 4.0.

Cite U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics directly for the figures themselves.