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Data · Union membership

Union membership and representation by state

How many workers in each state belong to a union or work under a union contract, and what share of all wage and salary workers that is. The figures are the Bureau of Labor Statistics' own, from its yearly Union Members release, and the earlier year is checked against the release in which BLS first printed it.

BLS says the 2025 figures are not strictly comparable with other years.

Checked October 30, 2026 · CC BY 4.0 · Not legal advice

What is in this dataset?

Employed wage and salary workers, union members and workers represented by unions (members plus workers covered by a union contract) in every state, DC and the nation, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' annual Union Members release (Current Population Survey): numbers in thousands as BLS prints them, each as a percent of employed workers, for the latest year and the year before, with the change in the members' percent. The 2025 annual figures average the 11 months BLS published (January to September, November and December).

Use it to size labor-relations and union-side or employer-side labor work by state: where union membership and contract coverage are highest, how many workers that is, and whether it is rising, beside the EEOC charges and wage-and-hour cases in the employment datasets. Agents can look up a state, compare states, or search by state name.

Records
52
Look up by
52
state
Primary-source records
52

The letters are explained in what P, S, D and U mean.

Where does the data come from?

BLS publishes Union Members once a year, usually in January (the 2025 figures came out on February 18, 2026), with Table 5 (states) and Table 1 (the nation) for the latest two years. Both tables are read in full and kept as printed. A gate compares the earlier year with BLS's previous release (as first published there), checks that the states add up to the national total within rounding, re-reads both pages and re-derives every record.

Period covered
2024 to 2025
Places
The whole US, all 50 states and DC
How often we refresh it
Once a year
The source's next release
January 2027
Records read
October 30, 2026

Official sources

The sources the records cite most

What does a record look like?

The full records add the dates, the quoted source text and every field in the CSV and JSON files below.

What each of the 18 main columns means
jurisdiction
Two-letter state code (50 states and DC), or US
level
us or state
stateName
State name (United States on the national record)
year
The latest year in the BLS release
status
P: the BLS figure as printed
value
Percent of employed wage and salary workers who are union members (the same as members_pct)
employed_k
Employed wage and salary workers, thousands (sole or principal job; self-employed excluded)
members_k
Members of a labor union or an employee association similar to a union, thousands
members_pct
members_k as a percent of employed_k (BLS)
represented_k
Union members plus workers with no union affiliation whose jobs are covered by a union or employee association contract, thousands
represented_pct
represented_k as a percent of employed_k (BLS)
previousYear
The year before (the second year of the release)
employed_k_prev
employed_k in previousYear
members_k_prev
members_k in previousYear
members_pct_prev
members_pct in previousYear
represented_k_prev
represented_k in previousYear
represented_pct_prev
represented_pct in previousYear
change_members_pct_pts
members_pct minus members_pct_prev, percentage points

How do I use it in my own tools?

union_lookup
For one two-letter state code (or US): the union membership rate (the share of wage and salary workers who are union members) and the share represented by unions, with the numbers of workers in thousands, for the latest year and the year before.
union_compare
The records of up to 10 states (or US) side by side: members and represented workers, thousands and percent, and the change.
union_search
Records whose text matches the words given, such as a state name.

How to cite this dataset

You can reuse, adapt and republish this data, including commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0). The only condition is that you credit Probative and link to the source.

Version
1.0.0, released October 31, 2026
Every version
10.5281/zenodo.23845986 (always points to the newest)
License
CC BY 4.0

Download the data

Free, no email or login. The files are hosted on this site and Zenodo, a public research archive.

Suggested citation

Probative. (2026). Union membership and representation by state (BLS Union Members), 2024 and 2025 (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23845987

Credit line for a chart, table or article

Source: Probative, Union membership and representation by state (BLS Union Members), 2024 and 2025, version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23845987, licensed CC BY 4.0.

Add to a reference manager (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote)

Not legal advice. These are survey estimates from the Current Population Survey, rounded to thousands and one decimal by BLS; small states have wider sampling error. The 2025 annual figures average the 11 months BLS published (January to September, November and December). BLS says the 2025 figures are not strictly comparable with other years.

What changed recently?

  • 2026-10-30 · BLS union members and workers represented by unions in every state and DC, 2024 and 2025: in 2025, 10.0% of U.S. wage and salary workers were union members, from 2.3% in South Dakota to 24.8% in Hawaii. (source)

The full log is in changes.json.

What are the limits?

  • These are survey estimates from the Current Population Survey, rounded by BLS to thousands of workers and one decimal; small states have wider sampling error.
  • Represented workers are union members plus workers whose jobs are covered by a union contract without being members.
  • The 2025 annual figures average the 11 months BLS published (January to September, November and December). BLS says the 2025 figures are not strictly comparable with other years.
  • The figures refer to each worker's sole or principal job; self-employed workers are left out, as BLS notes.
  • Records older than 400 days since their last check are marked stale in the files until we re-check them. Every confirmed error we fix is listed in the data corrections log.

Found a wrong value? Report an error with the record id and the source that shows the right value.

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