What it measures
- Number of employer establishments by detailed industry
- Employment and annual payroll for those establishments
- Establishment size classes, which show whether an industry is many small shops or a few large employers
- County, metro and ZIP level geography
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.
- Occupations or job titles
- Openings, hires or turnover
- Self-employed people without employees in the main series
Update cadence
Annual.
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 employer-landscape section on every state labor-market page (50 states and DC) uses CBP: how many employer establishments exist and how they are distributed by industry and size.
- Structural, annual context only. CBP is not an input to the Job Market Health score.
- Values Census suppresses are left unpublished rather than estimated.
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. Census Bureau publishes County Business Patterns. JobMarketHealth organizes and derives from that public data and is not its publisher.
Census County Business Patterns
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.
- 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.
Ready to look at an occupation? Search occupations to see the score, wage context and outlook for a specific job.