Unemployment Rate by Country
Key Findings
About This Dataset
Unemployment Rate by CountrySouth Africa is the highest in every year shown, rising from 22.8 percent in 2000 to 32.3 percent in 2024 and peaking at 33.3 percent in 2022 - a rate more than four times the group average. Spain has moved the most in the other direction, from a 22.1 percent peak in 2015 to 11.4 percent in 2024. The 2020 column captures the pandemic clearly in the United States, where the rate jumped from 3.7 to 8.1 percent before returning to 4.0 by 2024. India is the oddity: the modelled estimate barely moved between 2000 and 2015, sitting between 7.55 and 7.63 percent for fifteen years, before falling to 4.2 percent in 2024.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- World Bank Open Data
- Coverage
- 12 entities · 2000–2024 (8 years) · 96 observations
- Measure
- Unemployment Rate (% of labour force)
- Last updated
- 22 August 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Missing years are left empty rather than estimated — no interpolation, no carrying a previous year forward.
- Change is measured between the first and last year in which an entity actually reported a value, so a series that starts late is not penalised for the years before it existed.
- The compound annual rate is (last ÷ first)^(1 ÷ years) − 1, using those same two reported years.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value in 2024.
- An entity that reported nothing in the latest year is still listed — it follows the ranked entities in the table rather than being dropped.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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How these countries rank across all our charts
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