"Unemployment rate" is usually defined as (number of people looking for employment) / (number of people employed or looking for employment). So if you're not in

"Unemployment rate" is usually defined as (number of people looking for employment) / (number of people employed or looking for employment). So if you're not in the labor force (student, have given up looking for work, on disability, stay-at-home parent, etc), then the calculation ignores you--you count toward neither the numerator nor denominator. This came up the recent US recession because at the beginning of the "recovery," a significant portion of the drop in official unemployment rate came from people who had stopped looking for employment and resigned themselves to being out of the labor force for the time being.