What it measures
- Population, age, education and household characteristics
- Labor force participation, employment status and commuting
- Earnings and income distributions
- Housing costs and tenure, which shape what a wage is worth locally
What it does not measure
Most misreadings of labor data come from asking a dataset a question it was not built to answer. These are the limits worth holding onto.
- Job openings or employer hiring activity
- Detailed occupational wages at the level OEWS provides
- Anything close to real time. Even 1-year estimates describe a completed calendar year
Update cadence
Annual, with 1-year and 5-year estimate products.
Occupation pages name the specific release behind each figure and when it was imported, so you can see how current a number is rather than assuming it is new. More on that on about the data.
How we plan to use it
- Planned. ACS is not ingested today and contributes nothing to any figure on this site.
- The intended future use is geographic and cost of living context around local labor markets, clearly separated from the score.
Planned, not active
ACS is not ingested today. Nothing on this site is derived from it, and it does not affect any Job Market Health score.
Official source
U.S. Census Bureau publishes American Community Survey. JobMarketHealth organizes and derives from that public data and is not its publisher.
Census American Community Survey
Related guides
- How to compare local job marketsOccupational data goes local through OEWS employment and concentration. Monthly demand data mostly does not, so local comparisons need care about what is being compared.
Ready to look at an occupation? Search occupations to see the score, wage context and outlook for a specific job.