While the unemployment rate in the U.S. is still fairly low, data shows it’s not uncommon to see individuals job hunting for extended periods of time.

The unemployment rate remained flat at 4.2% in May, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.

However, over the past six months, it’s become “drastically harder to find a job,” whether you’re entering the job market for the first time or you’ve been looking for a while, according to Alí Bustamante, an economist and director at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank.

“It’s not that folks are losing their jobs,” Bustamante said. “It’s just that businesses are much more reticent to hire people, to make investments, because they just feel this very uncertain economic climate.”

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Bustamante and other economists say several data points beyond the headline job market numbers — the job-finding and quits rates, the share of workers who have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more, a broader rate of unemployment and the state of so-called “white collar” jobs — showcase deeper issues within the labor market.

“Employers aren’t hiring, they’re not firing. People aren’t leaving their jobs, and there’s just fewer opportunities right now,” said Cory Stahle, an economist at Indeed, a job search site.

As career coach Mandi Woodruff-Santos put it during a recent interview with CNBC: “The job market is kind of trash right now.”

Here’s what’s happening with unemployed Americans, in five charts.

The quits rate was at 2.0% in April, little changed from 2.1% in March, both numbers seasonally adjusted, according to the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of quits was down by 220,000 over the year.

Hiring activity has also been down in recent years. The rate of hires was at 3.5% in April, little changed from 3.4% in March, both seasonally adjusted, per the JOLTs report.

As people stay put in their jobs and employers are reluctant to hire, such factors create a “low hiring, low firing” environment, Stahle said.

The share of unemployed workers facing long-term unemployment — those who have been jobless for at least 27 weeks — was a seasonally adjusted 20.4% in May, according to the bureau’s latest data. That’s down from a seasonally adjusted 23.5% in April.

But the recent decline may not be an improvement. It could be signaling that a large number of long-term unemployed workers left the labor force altogether, he said. 

Considering that 139,000 jobs were added in May and about 218,000 workers are no longer in the unemployment cohort, there’s a significant gap of workers who were unemployed but did not secure new roles, Bustamante said.

What’s more, the number of people not in the labor force jumped by 622,000 in May.

“All the data point to long-term unemployment declining because people left the labor force,” Bustamante said.

The U-6 rate includes the total number of unemployed workers, plus all marginally attached workers, and the total employed part time for economic reasons.

Marginally attached workers are those who are neither working nor looking for a job — but indicate that they want and are available for work, and looked for a new role recently. There’s a subset of this group called discouraged workers, or those who are not currently looking for a job due to labor-market reasons. 

People employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but settled for a part-time schedule. 

As of the latest BLS data, the U-6 rate remained unchanged from April at 7.8%.

This data tells us that more and more Americans have either stopped looking for work out of labor-market frustrations, or are picking up part-time gigs to get by financially, experts say.

On the other hand, industries such as health care, construction and manufacturing have seen consistent job growth. Nearly half of the job growth came from health care, which added 62,000 jobs in May, the bureau found.

“There’s been a divergence in opportunity,” Stahle said. “Your experience with the labor market is going to depend largely on the type of work it is you’re doing.”

For all the drama in the stock market of late, investors’ portfolio balances may not look too different from when President Donald Trump entered office.

There have been some unnerving days amid the Trump administration’s tariff policies. The S&P 500 dropped by 2% or more on six days between Jan. 20 and June 6, according to data provided to CNBC by Morningstar Direct. During that period, there were 18 days where the index shed 1% or more.

Still, the S&P 500’s annualized return for Trump’s second presidency is positive, at 1.58%, Morningstar Direct found.

With more market swings on the horizon amid threats of a worsening trade war and warning signs in the labor market, the numbers serve up an old lesson for investors: When the market is freaking out, it pays to stay calm.

“I always remind clients that volatility doesn’t predict direction,” said Cathy Curtis, the founder of Curtis Financial Planning in Oakland, California. She is a member of CNBC’s Financial Advisor Council.

“Sharp daily declines can test resolve, but the market’s resilience highlights the peril of impulsive exits during turbulence,” said Douglas Boneparth, a certified financial planner and the founder of Bone Fide Wealth. He is also a member of CNBC’s Financial Advisor Council.

Almost all presidential terms since President Jimmy Carter saw healthy stock market returns for the full four or eight years, Mark Motley, portfolio manager at Foster & Motley in Cincinnati, wrote in a pre-election market update. The exception: President George W. Bush, due to the Great Recession.

Foster & Motley is No. 34 on the 2024 CNBC Financial Advisor 100 list.

To prove that point to clients, Curtis will show a chart of the S&P 500 going back to 1950.

For example, if you invested $1,000 in the index on Jan. 20, 1950, when Harry S. Truman was president, you’d have around $3.8 million as of the market’s close on June 6 of this year, Morningstar Direct found.

“The short-term dips are unmistakable, but so is the overall upward trend,” Curtis said.

As Senate Republicans debate President Donald Trump‘s “big beautiful bill”, a lesser-known provision from the House-approved package could make it harder to claim a low-income tax credit.

If enacted as written, the House measure in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” would require precertification of each qualifying child for filers claiming the so-called earned income tax credit, or EITC, starting in 2028.

Under current law, taxpayers claim the EITC on their tax return — including Schedule EIC for qualifying children.

The provision aims to “avoid duplicative and other erroneous claims,” according to the bill’s text. But policy experts say the new rules would burden eligible filers, who may forgo the EITC as a result. The measure could also delay tax refunds for those filers, particularly amid IRS cutbacks, experts say.

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“You’re going to flood the IRS with all these [EITC] documents,” said Janet Holtzblatt, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “It’s just not clear how they’re going to process all this information.”

Holtzblatt, who has pushed to simplify the EITC for decades, wrote a critique of the proposed precertification last week.

“This is not a new idea, but was previously considered, studied and rejected for very good reasons,” Greg Leiserson, a senior fellow at the Tax Law Center at New York University Law, wrote about the proposal in late May.

Studies during the George W. Bush administration found an EITC precertification process reduced EITC claims for eligible filers, Leiserson wrote. During the study, precertification also yielded a lower return on investment compared to existing EITC enforcement, such as audits, he wrote.

To qualify, you need “earned income,” or wages from work. The income phase-outs depend on your “qualifying children,” based on four IRS tests.

“Eligibility is complicated,” and residency requirements for qualifying children often cause errors, said Holtzblatt with the Tax Policy Center. 

For 2025, the tax break is worth up to $8,046 for eligible families. You can claim the maximum EITC with adjusted gross income up to $61,555 for single filers and $68,675 for married couples filing jointly. These phase-outs apply to families with three or more children.

As of December 2024, about 23 million workers received the EITC for tax year 2022, according to the IRS. But 1 in 5 eligible taxpayers don’t claim the tax break, the agency estimates.

Nine Democratic Senators last week voiced concerns about the House-approved EITC changes in a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.

If enacted, the updates would “further complicate the EITC’s existing challenges and make it more difficult to claim,” the lawmakers wrote.

Higher earners are more likely to face an audit, but EITC claimants have a 5.5 times higher audit rate than the rest of U.S. filers, partly due to improper payments, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The proposed EITC change, among other House provisions, still need Senate approval, and it’s unclear how the measure could change.

However, under the reconciliation process, Senate Republicans only need a simple majority to advance the bill.