The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual report, People with a Disability: Labor Force Characteristics — 2025, in February 2026, and the topline is a flat line: 22.8 percent of people with a disability were employed in 2025, little changed from the prior year, compared with roughly 65 percent of people without a disability. The unemployment rate for workers with a disability rose to 8.3 percent, about double the 4.1 percent rate among people without a disability, according to the BLS release.
What is inside the annual BLS disability report?
The report is the federal government's most detailed yearly accounting of how disabled Americans are faring at work, built on Current Population Survey data and broken down by age, sex, race, education, occupation, and disability type. Beyond the headline ratios, one structural number stands out: roughly three-quarters of people with a disability were not in the labor force at all in 2025, meaning they were neither employed nor actively looking, compared with about one-third of people without a disability. The BLS attributes much of that gap to the age profile of the disabled population, since a large share are 65 and older, but it also reflects people who want to work and have stopped searching. The report also showed the unemployment rate for men with a disability rising 0.9 percentage point to 8.4 percent.
How do the monthly nTIDE numbers relate to this?
The University of New Hampshire's National Trends in Disability Employment, or nTIDE, report issues monthly readings on the same underlying survey data, and it flagged the weakening trend in the unemployment rate through 2025 before the annual report confirmed it. For readers who follow this issue, the monthly series is the early warning system and the February BLS report is the authoritative yearbook; when both point the same direction, the trend is real.
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What does this change for disabled workers and job seekers?
Stagnation at 22.8 percent matters because the prior decade had been a story of steady gains, with the employment-population ratio for disabled Americans climbing year after year from its 2014 low. A second flat year suggests that progress has stalled, and the rising unemployment rate signals that people with disabilities who are actively job searching are having a harder time landing work. For disabled job seekers, the practical reading is sober but usable: labor force attachment still pays measurably, employment among degree holders with disabilities remains far higher than among those without credentials, and vocational rehabilitation and state workforce programs remain the main public levers.
What is the context other coverage missed?
Most summaries of the BLS report lead with the unemployment rate and stop. The number that deserves more attention is the labor force non-participation gap: the difference between about 75 percent and about 32 percent is the real size of the disability employment question, and it cannot be fixed by job-search assistance alone, because it reflects benefit-system cliffs, transportation, workplace accommodation, and employer screening practices. A ratio that counts only people actively looking will always understate the population that would work if the on-ramps were real. Reading the report that way turns a flat statistic into a policy map.
Where can readers verify the figures?
The full release, including detailed tables for 2024 and 2025 annual averages, is published on the BLS website, and the Labor Department's Office of Disability Employment Policy maintains a statistics hub that pairs the annual data with monthly updates.