By the numbers
Wisconsin’s labor force participation rate declined sharply in 2025, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show.
Labor force participation is a measure of the percentage of the civilian population 16 or older that is either working or actively looking for work. It includes people who are currently unemployed but applying for jobs, since they are part of the total supply of labor, but it does not include those who have stopped looking for work or who choose not to work.
The graph shows monthly seasonally adjusted data for Wisconsin in red and for the nation as a whole in blue.
The figures show that labor force participation was 65.9 percent at the beginning of the year, the level it had hovered around since mid-2023. As 2025 proceeded, participation marched steadily downward, dropping 1.8 percentage points to reach as low as 64.1 percent in November.
This continues an extended downward trend that began nearly three decades ago. Wisconsin’s labor force participation peaked at an all-time high of 74.5 percent in September 1997 and has slid downward since.
Wisconsin has had a consistently higher labor force participation rate than the rest of the United States but has moved in tandem with the nationwide trend. More recently, the gap between Wisconsin and the whole country has started to narrow.
While the broadly defined labor force includes both high school students on the lower end and retirees on the upper end, a narrower definition looks only at the percentage of people who are within their adult years. The measure of “prime age” labor force participation is the percentage of people from age 25 through 54 who are working or looking for work. The graph shows the prime-age cohort in green. State data for this subset is only available going back to 1999, and only on an annual average rather than monthly basis. Among people in that age range, Wisconsin has also seen a decline in participation. Prime-age labor force participation slipped from a peak of 90 percent in 2001 to a low of 84.6 percent in 2022, before rebounding slightly to 86.9 percent through November 2025.
Wyatt Eichholz is a policy and legislative associate at the Badger Institute.
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