The US economy in one table: growth, inflation, and unemployment since 2015

Key takeaways

Eleven years of the US economy fit in three columns: GDP growth, inflation, and unemployment, year by year since 2015. The table reads as three regimes: quiet, shock, and settling.
The shock years sit side by side: 2020 shows growth of minus 2.1 percent with unemployment averaging 8.1 percent; 2021 answers with 6.2 percent growth, the fastest year since 1984; 2022 pays for it with 8.0 percent inflation, the highest since 1981.
The latest rows read almost ordinary: growth of 2.8 percent in 2024 and 2.2 in 2025, inflation back to 2.9 by 2024, unemployment drifting up from 3.6 to 4.2 percent.

What's happening

This is the reference table behind a hundred charts: real GDP growth, consumer inflation, and unemployment for the United States, one row per year, World Bank figures. No trend line does the interpreting; the numbers sit next to each other and the story is in the rows.

Read down the columns and the decade splits cleanly. From 2015 through 2019 growth holds between 1.8 and 3.0 percent, inflation never reaches 2.5, and unemployment falls every single year, 5.3 to 3.7. Then the 2020 row breaks all three columns at once, and the table spends the rest of its rows working that shock out.

-2.1 → +6.2

US GDP growth in 2020 and 2021: the deepest contraction and the fastest expansion of the table in consecutive rows. The bill arrives one row later: 8.0 percent inflation in 2022.

Three regimes in eleven rows

The quiet regime, 2015 to 2019, is what economists meant by secular stagnation: decent growth, low inflation (0.1 percent in 2015, the oil-crash year), a labor market tightening by nearly half a point a year. The shock regime runs 2020 to 2022 and each year is extreme in a different column: output in 2020, growth in 2021, prices in 2022. That diagonal is the fingerprint of a demand shock met with stimulus, the response showing up first in activity and then in prices.

The settling regime, 2023 onward, is the part still being argued about. Growth returned to its 2015-to-2019 range almost immediately (2.9, 2.8, 2.2), and inflation took two more rows to follow (4.1, then 2.9). Unemployment paid surprisingly little for the disinflation, rising from 3.6 to 4.2 percent, which is what a soft landing looks like in a table.

What the superlatives attach to

Both extremes of the shock regime reach past the table's own window. The 6.2 percent growth of 2021 is the fastest calendar year since 1984, when the Reagan-era expansion hit 7.2 percent. The 8.0 percent inflation of 2022 is the highest since 1981, the tail end of the great inflation. The 2020 unemployment average of 8.1 percent, painful as it was, stayed below the 9.6 percent of 2010; the pandemic labor shock was deeper but far shorter than the financial crisis.

What to watch

The empty inflation cell for 2025, which fills when the World Bank publishes its annual figure. The unemployment column, where the drift from 3.6 to 4.2 percent is either normalization or the start of something, and one more row decides. And the growth column holding its 2-point-something habit: nine of the eleven rows land between 1.8 and 3.0.

Common questions

When was US inflation highest in recent years?

2022, at 8.0 percent on the annual average, the highest since 1981. It fell to 4.1 percent in 2023 and 2.9 in 2024.

What was the best year for US growth in this table?

2021, at 6.2 percent, the fastest calendar year since 1984. It followed the deepest contraction of the table, minus 2.1 percent in 2020.

How high did unemployment go in 2020?

The annual average was 8.1 percent. That is below the 9.6 percent of 2010: the pandemic shock was sharper month to month but much shorter than the financial crisis.

Why do some cells lag a year behind?

The three indicators publish on different schedules. Growth and unemployment for 2025 are in; the World Bank's annual inflation figure for 2025 arrives later, so that cell shows a gap until it does.

Data: US real GDP growth, consumer price inflation, and unemployment rate (World Bank annual figures), from the Kitegraph library, one row per year from 2015. All three are annual averages in percent; 2025 inflation is not yet published and shows as a gap. The since-1984 and since-1981 comparisons come from the same World Bank series, which run back to 1960.