Official UK unemployment stands at 2.67 million – but depending what you count, could be as low as 1.6 million or more than 11 million., with your help, digs into the figures. Get in touch below the line, email your views to james.ball@guardian.co.uk or tweet @jamesrbuk

How many unemployed people are there in the UK?

How many people in the UK are unemployed? Despite the attention paid to the latest update of official jobless figures released on Wednesday, this simple question doesn't have a simple answer.

In reality, depending on what you choose to count, unemployment in the UK could be as low as 1.6 million, or somewhere above 11 million or so.

The lower figure is the number of people currently claiming jobseeker's allowance, the UK's primary unemployment benefit. The higher is the number of adults aged 16 to 64 who are not currently in employment, though using such a figure obviously hugely distorts reality: it includes people such as stay-at-home parents, long-term disabled people unable to work, and those who choose not to work for other reasons.

The UK's official unemployment measure hit a 17-year high this week, reaching 2.67 million. This figure represents the number of people with no job who have actively looked for work in the last four weeks, and are available for immediate start.

So what accounts for the gap between 2.67 million and 11 million? Why does the UK have two official unemployment measures – and the US have six? Are there thousands or millions of 'hidden' unemployed around the country?

At the request of several commenters around the Guardian site – including on last week's Reality Check on vacancies – we've dug deeper into the figures.

Headline unemployment

This is the UK's official measure and the least contentious here – as described before, this is people without a job who are actively looking for one, and stands at 2.67 million people.

It's worth noting that by this measure, men are having a considerably harder time than women, with 1.55m unemployed men (9%) versus just 1.1m unemployed women (7.7%).

Part-time workers

The UK has around 7.7 million part-time workers, the majority of whom do not want to work full-time, according to the official measures.

However, in the current climate a substantial number of people have taken part-time jobs, but would prefer to work full-time, and say they are looking for full-time work.

At the latest count, including such workers in measures of unemployment (or people looking for work), would add 1.35m to our total – 591,000 of them men, 754,000 women.

Temporary workers

For similar reasons to part-time workers, there are a substantial number of people in temporary jobs at present who would prefer permanent work – 602,000, to be precise.

These are fairly evenly split between the genders, comprising 312,000 men and 290,000 women.

Economically inactive

Around 9.3 million working age adults in the UK are classed as "inactive" – out of employment but not unemployed. The biggest three components of this group are students, those looking after their families, and the long-term disabled.

However, some 2.26 million people in this group have told the Office of National Statistics they would like a job, but are not counted in the official unemployment figures either because they have not looked for work in the last four weeks, or would not be available to start work immediately.

This group is female-dominated, containing 1.3 million women versus around 900,000 men.

Anyone else?

There are two other groups who may be actively competing for the UK's 476,000 vacancies. Around 1.1m people in the UK work multiple (usually part-time) jobs in order to make ends meet, some of whom could reasonably be assumed might prefer a single full-time job.

A group less hard to quantify is the "under-employed" – recent university leavers who have taken shop or bar work while looking for graduate work, or similar. These individuals taking any role while times are slim often still actively seek employment with higher rewards, as numerous comments on the Guardian website and elsewhere attests.

The verdict

Counting every individual in each of the main categories above gives a total of just under 6.9 million people either looking for a job, or claiming they would like one – though some are in some form of employment.

This is without including whichever people working multiple jobs are job-hunting, or the under-employed.

Such figures help to explain the huge application ratios many jobseekers report experiencing in a way just comparing the headline 2.67 million unemployed figure to 476,000 vacancies might not.

As to which is the best measure of unemployment – that's trickier, and likely a measure of individual judgment: who should we count?

A final note, for now, is to look at the effect on the gender balance of the unemployed. If we look at headline unemployment, men have it substantially worse and have done so for a long time (though research suggests more women than men are losing their jobs in the current climate).

Using the wider measures, however, tips the scales slightly in the other direction. Of the 6.9 million people in the broad jobseekers' measure, women slightly outnumber men, at 3.46 million compared with 3.41 million. Women looking for work, it seems, are more likely to crop up in the less obvious corners of the statistics.

I'm going to speak to a few different groups through the day on who they think we should count as unemployed, and why, but would appreciate any thoughts or data, either in the comments below, by email to james.ball@theguardian.com, or through Twitter to @jamesrbuk – and if there's any other groups you think should be added to the analysis, let me know.

3.36pm update:

Thanks for a really interesting discussion in the comments, and to everyone who emailed with outside data or personal stories. As ever on this topic, they've been particularly helpful.

Several people wondered whether their own situation would be incorporated in the jobless statistics – particularly those looking for work without being "signed on" or using the Job Centres.

In general, such people are included, as commenter GarwinB noted in a thorough answer explaining how the official statistics are worked out:

A consideration of the methods used to create the figures should help people better understand what they are reading / commenting on. All the figures are estimates based on data generated by job centres or by National Statistics surveys (specifically the Labour Force Survey). So 2.26 million people have not told the ONS they would like a job, but this is extrapolated from the X number of people saying this from the 15,000 households surveyed. If the survey is done properly, then the data should reflect the composition of the population as a whole. Thus, there are no unemployed who are 'hidden' because they haven't been surveyed. I'm in the same position as TrinculoFish's son, so haven't been to the jobcentre as there's no point, but people like us should be in the 2.26 million as the survey is meant to capture people like us by knocking on a sample of our doors and asking if we have applied/looked for a job in the last month.

Sarah Clarkson of the GMB got in touch by email with a different way of measuring unempployment, used by the European Commission's statistics agency Eurostat.

This measures people with "low work intensity" – defined as adults who spend less than 20% of the time they could be working at work – and its effect on poverty. The UK seems to do badly by such a measure, Clarkson notes:

"Unlike statistics which simply demonstrate jobless households, work intensity takes explicit account of part-time work (as it takes into account the hours worked each month), as well as those working for only part of the year (by calculating it on a monthly basis). "On this basis, the UK has the highest figure in the EU for people living in households with very low work intensity (Source: Eurostat). "Workless and 'work poor' (those with a low work intensity) households are more likely to be at risk of poverty. Statistics show that throughout the EU, the more people in a household are employed full-time, the less the risk of poverty and, to an even greater extent, the less the chances of being persistently at risk of poverty."

The press release from Eurostat can be found here (PDF) and the full data here (PDF again).

Nancy Kelley of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation also noted under-employment would likely have an effect on in-work child poverty, which stands at 38% for families where only one adult works, versus 11% where both parents are in work, according to the organisation's Monitoring of Poverty and Social Exclusion report (PDF)

Kelley noted under-employment prevented a risk for such families as taking multiple jobs was more difficult with childcare and other commitments:

One of the (many) reasons underemployment is an issue is that given the large number of very poorly paid jobs (and the projected increase in same), families with children commonly need to patch together quite a lot of worked hours in order to lift their family out of poverty. Rising part time work will equal both more underemployment, and more in-work child poverty because making the maths work just won't be possible for many families.

That rounds off today's Reality Check, but as ever it's a topic we feel there's more to dig around in, and more to be checked. Feel free to suggest topics you think we should look at, either by email or Twitter (details above), or in the comments thread below.