2025 Union Members — 2026-02-18

The union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions --was 10.0 percent in 2025, little changed from the prior year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions was 14.7 million in 2025. In 1983, the first year for which comparable data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union members. Data about union members are collected as part of the Current Population Survey, a nationwide sample survey of households in which people are asked, among other things, about union membership. (See the Technical Note in this news release.) --The union membership rate of public-sector workers (32.9 percent) continued to be more than five times higher than the rate of private-sector workers (5.9 percent). (See table 3.) --Workers in education, training, and library occupations (32.5 percent) and in protective service occupations (31.3 percent) had the highest unionization rates.