What it measures
- Base year and projected employment for each detailed occupation
- Percent change in employment over the projection horizon
- Projected average annual openings, which combine growth with replacement needs from workers leaving the occupation
- Typical entry level education, prior work experience and on the job training
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.
- Openings available right now. Projected annual openings is a modeled yearly average, not a live vacancy count
- Local or metro projections. The federal series is national
- Recessions, policy changes or technology shifts that arrive after the projection was published
Update cadence
Annual, covering the published long-term projection horizon.
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
- Projected employment growth and projected annual openings feed the Long-Term Outlook component.
- Education and training requirements are shown on occupation pages as context.
- The projection horizon shown on each page is whatever the published release itself reports, so it moves when BLS publishes a new vintage.
Where it sits
This dataset feeds the composite score. The weighting of each component is set out on the methodology page. Read the methodology.
Official source
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes Employment Projections. 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.
Related guides
- Projected growth vs projected annual openingsGrowth is a rate. Annual openings is a count. Large occupations can offer far more openings while growing slowly, and fast growing niches can offer very few.
- How to tell if a job market is healthyHealthy is not the same as large or well paid. It means employers are actively adding people, separations are not spiking, and the occupation has room to keep hiring.
Ready to look at an occupation? Search occupations to see the score, wage context and outlook for a specific job.