Your Odds of Getting Laid Off

The most recent government unemployment report revealed close to 600,000 jobs lost in January. That figure, thrown over the total number of employed workers in the U.S. last month, about 137 million, loosely implies you had about a 0.4% chance of getting laid off.  Translation:  A one in 250 chance of losing your job.

We decided to compare that to other life event probabilities. Here are the odds for:

Getting a perfect score on the SATs (2400 out if 2400): One in 6,000

Getting into Harvard Business School: One in eight

Getting struck by lightning: One in 600,000

Getting struck by lightning again: One in 360 billion

Winning the Mega Millions lottery:  One in 135 million

Conceiving naturally and having twins: One in 80 pregnancies

Conceiving naturally and having triplets: One in 6,400 pregnancies

Conceiving naturally and having octuplets: One in 20 trillion pregnancies