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—was little changed at 3.2 percent in 2024, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The jobless rate for all veterans also was little changed over the year at 3.0 percent. In August 2024, 48 percent of Gulf War-era II veterans had a service-connected disability, compared with 31 percent of all veterans.
This information was obtained from the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly sample survey of about 60,000 eligible households that provides data on employment, unemployment, and people not in the labor force in the United States. Data about veterans are collected monthly in the CPS; these monthly data are the source of the 2024 annual averages presented in this news
release. In August 2024, a supplement to the CPS collected additional information about veterans on topics such as service-connected disability and veterans’ current or past Reserve or National Guard membership. The supplement was co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the U.S. Department of Labor’s Veterans’ Employment and Training Service. For
more information, see the Technical Note in this news release.
Highlights from the 2024 data:
• The unemployment rate for all veterans (3.0 percent) was lower than the rate for nonveterans (3.9 percent) in 2024. (See table A.)
• The unemployment rates for male veterans (2.9 percent) and female veterans (3.5 percent) changed little in 2024. The unemployment rate for male veterans was not statistically different from the rate for female veterans. (See table A.)
• Unemployment rates for White, Black, and Hispanic veterans were lower than for nonveterans in 2024, while the rate for Asian veterans was not statistically different than their nonveteran counterparts. (See table 1.)
• Among the 250,000 unemployed veterans in 2024, 60 percent were ages 25 to 54, 35 percent were age 55 and over, and 5 percent were ages 18 to 24. (See table 2A.)
• Gulf War-era II veterans who reported a service-connected disability rating of less than 30 percent in August 2024 were more likely to be in the labor force than those with a rating of 60 percent or higher (90.0 percent versus 74.5 percent). (See table 7.)
• In August 2024, 36.5 percent of employed veterans with a service-connected disability worked in the public sector, compared with 19.8 percent of veterans with no disability and 12.4 percent of nonveterans. (See table 8.)
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