The number of people with disabilities across the nation who are employed is at its highest level since federal officials started keeping track.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics says that 22.5% of people with disabilities had jobs in 2023. That’s an increase of 1.2 percentage points from the year before and is the most since the agency started collecting data on disability employment in 2008.

The findings come from an annual report out this month that’s based on information gathered last year through the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of some 60,000 households about employment and unemployment in the U.S.

Despite the gains, the employment rate for people with disabilities was roughly a third of that for the general population and unemployment rates remained much higher for those with disabilities compared to others no matter their level of education.

“Across all age groups, people with a disability were much less likely to be employed than those with no disability,” the Labor Department found.

People with disabilities were almost twice as likely as others to work part-time and a larger percentage of these individuals were self-employed, the data shows. They were also more commonly employed in service occupations and were “much less likely” to work in management and professional positions.

Overall, about three-quarters of people with disabilities were considered to be “not in the labor force,” the vast majority of whom did not want a job.

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