What it measures
- Employment counts for roughly 800 detailed occupations
- Hourly and annual wage percentiles, including the median and the mean
- Jobs per thousand and location quotients, which show where an occupation is concentrated
- Estimates by metro area and by industry
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.
- Total compensation. OEWS includes commissions, tips and production bonuses, but excludes overtime pay, nonproduction and stock bonuses, and employer-paid benefits
- What a new hire will be offered today. Estimates reflect a reference period that is months old at publication
- Wage growth for an individual worker over a career
- Openings or hiring activity of any kind
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
- Score input: the change in national OEWS employment for each detailed occupation over a fixed five-year window is the occupation employment trend, 60% of the Occupation Fundamentals component.
- Wages are not an input to the Job Market Health score. A high paying occupation is not automatically a healthy one.
- Context: median and percentile wages, metro employment and state pay comparisons are shown on occupation and occupation-state pages. OEWS employment is also used to weight occupation-level AI measures on the AI & Jobs page.
- Some values are suppressed or capped by BLS. Where that happens the page says the figure is not published rather than filling it in.
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 Occupational Employment and Wage 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 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics
Related guides
- How to read occupational wage dataA published median gives you a pay benchmark, not a salary quote. To use it well, match the occupation and location, look at the spread, and check which parts of compensation the estimate includes.
- 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.