JobMarketHealth

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

LAUS: Local Area Unemployment Statistics

LAUS publishes official monthly unemployment, employment and labor-force estimates for states and local areas, including metros. It measures residents separately from workplace payroll jobs.

Shown as contextMonthly

What it measures

  • Statewide unemployment rate
  • Statewide employment and labor force (people working or looking for work)

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.

  • Unemployment in a specific occupation
  • Job openings or hiring
  • Exact counts: state figures are model-based estimates and are revised each year

Update cadence

Monthly.

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

  • Shown on every state labor-market page as statewide context.
  • Metro profiles and comparisons show separately dated, not seasonally adjusted unemployment rates from the official monthly metro release. Comparisons use the same month a year earlier and attach only when their source period and release agree with payroll.
  • LAUS is not an input to the Job Market Health score.

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 Local Area Unemployment Statistics. 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 Local Area Unemployment Statistics

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.

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