About the data

Primary sources

Three roles matter, and this site keeps them separate everywhere: datasets that feed the score, datasets shown as context, and datasets planned for later enrichment that are not ingested today.

Why the schedules differ

Fast data is broad and slow data is specific. Monthly surveys of establishments, such as JOLTS and CES, can publish within weeks because they ask a small number of questions of a sample of employers, and they classify jobs by industry. Occupational estimates require far more detail per job, so OEWS publishes annually. Long term projections are modeled once a year over the published long-term projection horizon.

That is not an inconsistency to be smoothed over. It means the most current thing you can know about an occupation is industry demand pressure, while the most precise things you can know about it, wages and staffing, describe a period that has already closed.

Freshness and release cadence

Each source reports its own latest release label, release date, and import time, plus a state: current, stale, missing, or unknown. The homepage data sources section shows those states live, so if a feed falls behind, the site says so rather than presenting the last known number as though it were new.

National coverage today, geography later

The score is national. Occupation pages show metro employment and wages from OEWS as context, because those estimates exist at metro level, but there is no metro or state level Job Market Health score, and metro lists are ordered by employment rather than presented as rankings of the best places to work.

Local enrichment would need Census sources such as ACS, County Business Patterns and Business Dynamics Statistics. Those are planned, not active. Until they are ingested, no local figure appears anywhere on this site.

Published scores versus later revisions

Federal statistics get revised, sometimes months later. When that happens, affected scores are recalculated, so a month can carry both the value first published and a restated value. Scores also carry a confidence rating with its reasons, which is how a month built on partial or stale inputs is flagged rather than hidden.

Provenance and methodology versioning

Every score records the methodology version it was computed under. Changes ship as a new version rather than a silent rewrite of history. The current weighting is described on the methodology page.

Limitations

• Government data is lagged. Nothing here describes this week.
• Estimates can be revised, and suppressed values are left empty rather than filled in.
• Monthly demand data is industry based, so occupation level demand is weighted exposure rather than a measured occupational vacancy count.
• An occupation-level score is a market signal, not a promise about an individual job search. Your experience, location and field of specialization matter more to your outcome than any national average.
• This site is a read-only consumer of published data. It does not collect job postings and does not publish original statistics.

Next: read the dataset pages for what each source measures, or the guides for how to use these measures in a real job search.