Data story · October 21, 2026 · All data stories
About one in ten U.S. wage and salary workers belongs to a union. That average hides very different pictures across kinds of work.
The picture
Each bar shows the share of workers in a major occupation group who were union members in 2025. The gold bar at the top is the all-worker rate of 10.0%. Groups are listed in the order of the federal occupation codes, not by size.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, union membership by occupation, 2025 annual averages (employed wage and salary workers). Occupation groups follow the Standard Occupational Classification.
What stands out
- Two groups are far above the rest. Education, training and library (32.5%) and Protective service (31.3%) have union membership rates around three times the all-worker average.
- The bottom of the range is low. Farming, fishing and forestry (2.4%) and Sales and related (2.5%) have the lowest rates, and 13 of 22 groups are below the all-worker rate.
- Only 9 of the 22 groups are above the all-worker rate, so the average is pulled up by a few groups where membership is common.
What this does and does not say
Membership is not the same as being covered by a union contract; some workers are represented without being members. These are national figures for broad groups, so they say little about a particular job, employer or state. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also publishes membership by state and by industry, and those figures can differ a great deal from these group averages; it reports a much higher membership rate for public-sector workers than for private-sector workers. The figures do not say whether union membership is good or bad for a worker.
How we computed this
We use the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ published membership rate for each major occupation group and for all workers. The rates are survey estimates and have sampling error, which is typically larger for groups with fewer workers, such as farming, fishing and forestry.
MajorPays shares information, not advice. Figures are group statistics from U.S. government sources, not predictions for any person, and MajorPays does not rank schools or places. See our methodology.