In the news stories yesterday – we were all shocked at the 3.283M Americans newly unemployed. My mind quickly went to, “What is the updated unemployment percentage?” As the newscasts did not mention this number.

The federal government doesn’t calculate it weekly, just monthly.

So I approximated it at 5.5%.

Assumptions in the approximation:

• No one unemployed the prior week found a job
• Without seasonally adjusted numbers calculations

Sources: 

https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf  (yellow highlighted number)

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm (blue highlighted numbers)