Workers' resolve drives increase in unionization in 2025
Report • By Celine McNicholas, Margaret Poydock, and Heidi Shierholz • February 18, 2026
In 2025, 16.5 million workers in the United States were represented by a union—an increase of 463,000 from 2024 and the highest number of unionized workers in the U.S. in 16 years. These 16.5 million unionized workers account for 11.2% of all wage and salary workers, up from 11.1% in 2024. The increase is a departure from prior years’ downward trend in union density. It demonstrates working people’s desire for greater agency in their workplaces and in shaping the policies that affect their lives. In a time of fear, uncertainty, and hardship, the importance and benefits of unionization are especially clear. Further, this increase occurred despite the nation’s broken system of labor law and the most anti-union president in history. It is a testament to working people’s resolve and the fact that unions are increasingly viewed favorably and recognized as critical instruments for building a just economy.
What the 2025 unionization data show
The number of workers represented by a union increased by 463,000 to 16.5 million in 2025, the highest level recorded in 16 years. These unionized workers account for 11.2% of all wage and salary workers, bringing union density back to its 2023 rate. The fact that union density is at its highest since just 2023, while the total number of union-represented workers is at its highest since 2009, reflects growth in overall employment—the denominator of the rate—over this period. When assessing trends in unionization, it is useful to examine changes in both rates and levels; rate changes capture shifts in the share of workers who are unionized, while level changes capture the net amount of successful new organizing (recalling that when new businesses open, they do not automatically adopt the unionization rate of existing firms; they must be organized, a process that requires substantial time and effort).
As a result of the government shutdown in 2025 from October 1 to November 12, the survey the union membership data are based on—the Current Population Survey (CPS)—was not conducted in October, and the 2025 figures therefore reflect an average of the remaining 11 months. To assess the impact of the missing month on reported changes in unionization, we recalculated 2024 estimates excluding October to ensure an apples-to-apples comparison between 2024 and 2025. The results indicate that the absence of October data in 2025 did not greatly affect the key findings: Union representation increased by 439,000 in this exercise—compared with 463,000 as published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)—and union density rose by 0.1 percentage points, identical to the published change. Nonetheless, the loss of a month of CPS data—something that has never occurred in the history of the survey—represents a serious and preventable degradation of the nation’s labor market statistics, reducing their precision, even where headline estimates appear relatively unaffected.
The overall union density of 11.2% masks large differences in unionization by sector. Unionization is far more prevalent in the public sector than the private sector: In 2025, 36.4%of public-sector workers were covered by a union contract, compared with 6.8% of private-sector workers. Both the public and the private sectors saw increases in unionization in 2025.
https://www.epi.org/publication/workers-resolve-drives-increase-in-unionization-in-2025/