What is in this file
One row per state, plus DC and Puerto Rico where available. The rank universe is 50 states; reference rows have an empty rank. The file is sorted by descending value with reference jurisdictions after the states.
- Period
- September 2026
- Release
- 2026-10-20
- Updated
- 2026-10-23
- Producer
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Source
- Local Area Unemployment Statistics · LAUS LASST..03, September 2026 (SA)
- Units
- Percent
- Cadence
- Monthly; annual revision each spring
Quick validation snapshot
California and Connecticut share the highest estimate (5.1%); South Dakota has the lowest (2.0%). The U.S. benchmark is 4.2%. The U.S. rate comes from the national Current Population Survey (series LNS14000000). These are useful checks when importing the CSV into a spreadsheet. Reference jurisdictions may lie outside the 50-state range, so exclude rows marked reference when reproducing the default state ranks.
Margins are 90% intervals calculated as 1.645 × the model-based standard error BLS publishes for the latest month. Preserve them when reshaping the data; an empty cell and a numeric zero have different meanings.
Calculation and reproducibility
Published seasonally adjusted rate for September 2026 (measure 03 of each state LASST series). 90% MOE = 1.645 × the standard error of the rate (laexderr.xlsx). History: period M13 of the LAUST series.
Immutable edition 2026-10-23 CSV · Full edition registry, including available histories
Column definitions
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| rank | 1 + the number of states with a higher source value; empty for reference rows. |
| jurisdiction | State name or labeled reference jurisdiction. |
| value | Numeric estimate, using the source’s available precision. |
| unit | Percent |
| moe_90 | Published 90% margin of error in the same units; empty when not published. |
| reference | True if excluded from the default 50-state ranking. |
| period | Reference period of the observation. |
| release | Date of the source release. |
| source | Producer and table/file identifier. |
| source_url | Producer file or source documentation; microdata rows link to the specific state input ZIP. |
Limits and reuse
Monthly state rates are model-based estimates and are preliminary for the latest month; BLS revises them the following month and again each year. People who have stopped looking for work are not counted as unemployed.
This is an independent arrangement of federal statistical data. Cite the named producer for the original observations and Rank the States for computed ranks. Downloading or embedding does not imply government endorsement. Source files are archived with a checksum for reproducibility.
SHA-256 of the concatenated input SHA-256 strings; the flat files are archived gzip-compressed and hashed after decompression. SHA-256: 95f693a303b7a95145c1191cdfb7bd5b47e10fc1f4c6a04ec2c2b982435d4d48
Citation
Rank the States. Unemployment rate, September 2026. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Local Area Unemployment Statistics, LAUS LASST..03, September 2026 (SA); released 2026-10-20. Edition 2026-10-23. https://rankthestates.com/data/editions/2026-10-23/unemployment-rate.csv