Visualization: Large County Employment, Establishments, and Wages

Quarterly data covering about 355 large counties.

The source of this data is the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an agency of the United States Department of Labor.

The employers that are counted in QCEW are “workers covered by State unemployment insurance (UI) laws and Federal workers covered by the Unemployment Compensation for Federal Employees (UCFE) program.” ⁽¹⁾https://www.bls.gov/cew/overview.htm Importantly, this misses some workers: “QCEW excludes proprietors, the unincorporated self-employed, unpaid family members, certain farm and domestic workers from having to report employment data, and railroad workers covered by the railroad unemployment insurance system.” Also omitted are “certain national security agencies.”

This subset of QCEW data reports on the 355 most populous counties, or 356 if the District of Columbia is included. Data is published for each quarter, and is not seasonally adjusted.

To access the interactive visualization, click here.

For more visualizations, click here.