Union membership up 400,000 in ‘25
The number of Americans who are union members increased by slightly more than 400,000 in 2025 compared to the previous year.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual union membership report, the number of workers belonging to unions was 14.6 million in 2025, compared to 14.2 million the prior year.
As a result of this bump, the union membership rate, the percent of wage and salary workers who are members of unions, increased 0.1 percent to 10 percent in 2025, slightly more than 9.9 percent in 2024.
For comparison, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent in 1983, and there were 17.7 million total union members. This was the first year that comparable data was collected.
Other analysis using 2025 data was impacted by the fall government shutdown, however. The BLS noted that the Current Population Survey (CPS) for October 2025 was not collected due to the federal government shutdown.
As a result, annual estimates for the 2025 household survey data were produced using 11-month averages that exclude October. As a result, the agency cautioned that the 2025 annual estimates cannot be properly compared with annual averages for other years.
Since union membership and earnings data are collected from only one quarter of the CPS sample, they are already based on a relatively small data set and thus are even more affected by the lack of October data.
Similarly, the BLS said state union membership estimates for 2025 should be interpreted with caution.
Fair-share payers, workers who are represented by unions and do not pay union dues but instead pay fair-share fees to cover the cost of representation, increased from 16.02 million (11.1 percent) in 2024 to 16.48 million (11.2 percent) in 2025.
According to the AFL-CIO, the 11.2 percent fair-share payer rate is the highest in the past 16 years. The increase in union membership comes at a time when union approval ratings remain near an all-time high.
According to a Gallup poll, 68 percent of Americans approve of unions.
Since 1970, the only years with higher approval ratings for unions were 2024 (70 percent approval rating) and 2023 (70 percent approval rating). The 2025 approval rating tied 2021, which also came in at 68 percent.
The all-time high for union approval ratings, according to Gallup, was 75 percent in 1953 and 1957.
In a prepared statement on the BLS report, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said the efforts by billionaire bosses and union-busting politicians to scare unions from organizing are failing.
“Working people are experiencing relentless attacks on our freedoms and our livelihoods,” said Shuler. “These numbers confirm what we’ve seen in the labor movement: Workers have felt President Trump’s billionaire-first agenda in action and are hungry to take back their power.
“Workers know that the best check on a bad boss is a strong union contract. In 2026, workers will continue to organize in every corner of the country and build power to fight for the lives they deserve.”
For the second year in a row, union membership in Ohio dropped, this time by roughly 16,000 members.
The BLS report showed the number of union members in the Buckeye State decreased from 621,000 in 2024 to 605,000 in 2025. This represents a union density drop from 12.1 in 2024
to 11.6 percent last year.
Compared to the national average, the union construction industry saw a larger surge in membership, as the union density jumped to 11.1 percent from 10.3 percent the previous year.
The overall number of building trades members grew by 79,000 to 995,000. This increase recoups some of the losses experienced during the two-year drop in 2023 and 2024 that
saw the union construction industry lose about 103,000 members.
Overall, the total number of construction workers – both union and non-union – grew from 8.8 million to 9 million.
The non-union sector saw a 121,000 increase in workers, roughly 1.5 times the number of new union members.
Last year, union construction workers brought home about $55 more per week than the prior year. The industry’s full-time median weekly income was $1,585, up from $1,530 in 2024.
In 2025, non-union construction workers earned a full-time median weekly income of $1,132, up roughly $81 from $1,051 in the previous year. This means union workers earn, on average, $453 more per week than their non-union counterparts.
When the figures are extended to a full year, union construction workers earned a full-time median income of just over $23,000 more in 2025 than their non-union counterparts.
Additionally, the data does not account for the entire wage package union members received.
Nationwide, the pay gap between all union and non-union workers remained about the same.
The BLS reported that the union membership rate for public-sector workers was 32.9 percent in 2025, more than five times the rate for private-sector workers (5.9 percent). In 2025, the number of employees who belonged to unions was similar in the public sector (7.3 million) and the private sector (7.4 million).
In the private sector, industries with the highest unionization rates in 2025 included utilities 17.8 percent), transportation and warehousing (13.6 percent) and educational services (13.4 percent). The lowest unionization rates occurred in finance (0.8 percent), insurance (1.2 percent), professional and technical services (1.3 percent), agriculture and related industries (1.6 percent) and food services and drinking places (1.8 percent).