Active duty personnel isn't in the labor force in either status. The full name for the widely quoted BLS stat is "noninstitutionalized civilian labor force". I

Active duty personnel isn't in the labor force in either status. The full name for the widely quoted BLS stat is "noninstitutionalized civilian labor force". If I have my numbers right, there are ~120M men ages 20+ and ~125.5M women 20+ in the US. That's basically equal to the BLS female labor force stat, but about ~3M too high for the male labor force stat, with prisoners and military personnel making up the vast majority of the difference. It's not a huge gap in numbers, but both exclusions are overwhelmingly prime-age people and skew the male LFPR towards retirees. (I should have been clearer, but my first set of bullets are about exclusions from the LFPR, and my second are about data in the LFPR but not in nonfarm payrolls. "Nonfarm payroll" appears to be a strict subset of the labor force "employed" pool. Both measures exclude active military personnel, although nonfarm payrolls uses a slightly broader standard which also covers intelligence agencies.)