2016 Employment Characteristics of Families — 2017-04-20

In 2016, 6.5 percent of families included an unemployed person, down from 6.9 percent in 2015, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Of the nation's 82.1 million families, 80.4 percent had at least one employed member in 2016. These data on employment, unemployment, and family relationships are collected as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly survey of about 60,000 households. Data in this release are annual averages. Families are classified either as married- couple families or as families maintained by women or men without spouses present. Unless otherwise noted, families include those without children as well as those with children under age 18. For further information, see the Technical Note in this news release. The number of families with at least one member unemployed decreased by 314,000 to 5.3 million in 2016. The proportion of families with an unemployed person declined by 0.4 percentage point to 6.5 percent.