JobMarketHealth

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Business Employment Dynamics: Business Employment Dynamics (BED)

The job gains and losses underneath net employment change: gains at expanding and opening private-sector establishments, and losses at contracting and closing establishments.

Shown as contextQuarterly, with a publication lag of several months

What it measures

  • Gross job gains and gross job losses
  • Employment changes at expanding, opening, contracting and closing establishments
  • Published job-flow rates relative to average employment
  • Seasonally adjusted state total-private and national industry series, kept separate

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.

  • All hires, layoffs, vacancies or worker turnover
  • Occupation-specific hiring demand
  • Government employment or the self-employed
  • Firm startups or permanent shutdowns from the opening/closing series
  • Independent confirmation of QCEW or an input to Job Market Health scores

Update cadence

Quarterly, with a publication lag of several months.

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 JobMarketHealth uses it

  • The Job Creation & Loss explorer serves a validated committed aggregate snapshot with 20 common quarters for the U.S., all 50 states and D.C., and 13 national industry sectors.
  • State labor-market pages show the state's latest published gross gains, gross losses and derived net change, with explicit reference and publication dates.
  • National levels are converted from BLS's published thousands; state levels remain individual jobs. Published one-decimal rates are not reverse-engineered into employment denominators. Calculated rate differences are approximate.
  • Components reconcile to published totals within declared rounding. No missing or suppressed observation is substituted with zero. Administrative-event flags remain visible.
  • Historical data use the current source vintage. A scheduled official-source check produces a validated candidate for review, not an automatic publication or score change. Visitors never request upstream BLS files.
  • BED links QCEW establishment records. State and national industry figures are not summed to recreate the independently published national series.

Where it sits

This dataset is displayed as context on the pages described above and is not an input to the score. Read the methodology.

Official source

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes Business Employment Dynamics (BED). JobMarketHealth organizes and derives from that public data and is not its publisher.

BLS notice

Statistics on this site are retrieved from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, including through its public data services. BLS.gov cannot vouch for the data or analyses derived from these data after the data have been retrieved from BLS.gov. BLS does not sponsor or endorse JobMarketHealth, and our derivation and interpretation are our own. More in the data and career disclaimer.

BLS Business Employment Dynamics

Related guides

  • Occupation vs industry job dataIndustry is who pays you. Occupation is what you do. The fastest data is by industry, the data that matches a job title is slower, and bridging them requires weighting.
  • Job openings vs hires: what the gap meansA vacancy headline can look strong even when hiring has slowed. Reading openings alongside hires helps you see both sides, as long as you keep their different counting periods in mind.

Ready to look at an occupation? Search occupations to see the score, wage context and outlook for a specific job.