What it measures
- Statewide employment, hires and separations for all industries
- Turnover and average monthly earnings of stable workers
- Employment, hires, separations and stable-worker earnings for 50 verified metropolitan areas, across all industries and 20 NAICS sectors
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. QWI is built from employer and worker records, not job titles
- Current conditions. The newest published quarter is usually about nine months old
Update cadence
Quarterly, typically about three quarters after the reference quarter.
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 state labor-market pages as statewide workforce-flow context only. Not occupation data and not used in scores.
- The 50 metro profiles sum all 71 verified state portions at one common quarter for each metro, compare with the same quarter a year earlier, and weight earnings by each portion's stable employment. A value stays blank when any required portion is unpublished; metros are compared only at the same quarter.
- Metro figures are not seasonally adjusted. Census ownership code A00 covers state, local and private jobs; federal jobs are outside this measure. The metro totals include all sexes and age groups. Hires count job starts during the quarter, not unique people or job openings.
- Only values with accepted Census publication flags 1, 6 or 10 are used. Suppressed, missing or otherwise unpublished values remain unknown and are never substituted with zero; if no complete quarter qualifies, the section says the data is unavailable.
- Scheduled Census API refreshes update saved QWI snapshots. The 50-metro expansion was initialized from official Census public-use bulk CSV files, with verified file checksums, state version declarations and retrieval receipts. Source observation quarters, file versions and retrieval dates remain distinct. Visitors read saved snapshots and never wait on Census requests.
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 LEHD Quarterly Workforce Indicators. JobMarketHealth organizes and derives from that public data and is not its publisher.
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.
Ready to look at an occupation? Search occupations to see the score, wage context and outlook for a specific job.