2015 Employment Situation of Veterans — 2016-03-22

The unemployment rate for veterans who served on active duty in the U.S. Armed Forces at any time since September 2001--a group referred to as Gulf War-era II veterans--declined by 1.4 percentage points over the year to 5.8 percent in 2015, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The jobless rate for all veterans, at 4.6 percent, also declined from a year earlier. About 33 percent of Gulf War-era II veterans reported having a service-connected disability in August 2015, compared with 20 percent of all veterans. This information was obtained from the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly sample survey of about 60,000 households that provides data on employment and unemployment in the United States. Data about veterans are collected monthly in the CPS; those monthly data are the source of the 2015 annual averages presented in this news release.