BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW)
The BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages reports employment and wages for
workers covered by state unemployment-insurance (UI) programs, broken out by
industry, for counties, metros, and states. It is a near-complete count of covered
employment and the source of industry employment figures in this Commons.
Coverage
Base Data Commons graph
Source & License
- Publisher: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in cooperation with state workforce agencies.
- Access: Published at bls.gov/cew; served into this Commons through the Google Data Commons base graph.
- License: Public domain. A work of the U.S. Government, free to use and redistribute with attribution to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Methodology
- Administrative census, not a survey: QCEW is compiled from the quarterly contributions reports employers file for unemployment insurance, so it counts essentially all UI-covered jobs rather than sampling.
- Coverage: about 95% of U.S. jobs are UI-covered. Not covered: most self-employed, certain agricultural and religious-organization workers, and some railroad employment.
- Industry detail: employment and wages are classified by the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).
Coverage & caveats
- Geographies: counties, metros, and states.
- Disclosure suppression: wage and employment detail is withheld for industries with too few employers in an area to protect confidentiality.
- Jobs, not people: QCEW counts filled jobs (an employment count), so a person holding two covered jobs is counted twice.
Variables (1)