Covered employment: methodology

Employment covered by unemployment insurance, as published by the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW). All ownerships — private, federal, state and local government — and all industries.

A count, not an estimate. QCEW is compiled from the quarterly contribution reports every employer subject to state unemployment insurance law must file, so it covers about 95% of US jobs rather than a sample of them. That is what makes county and industry detail possible, and it is why the figures arrive roughly six months after the quarter ends.

Each value is a count of jobs, not of people. It is the number of filled positions on the payroll for the pay period including the 12th of the month; someone holding two covered jobs is counted twice, and a self-employed person with no UI coverage is not counted at all. That also makes this series different in kind from our unemployment-rate series, which counts residents by where they live: QCEW counts jobs by where the establishment is.

Monthly values inside a quarterly release. QCEW publishes three monthly employment levels per quarter, and we store them as the monthly series they are rather than averaging them into a single quarterly figure.

The most recent quarter is preliminary and is normally revised in the next release, along with the earlier quarters of the same year. BLS publishes no flag distinguishing it, so none is stored; what protects you is the vintage. Every run stores its values under the date they were published, so a figure you cited stays retrievable after it is revised.

Suppression. Where publishing a figure would identify an individual employer, BLS withholds it — and writes zero into the file. We store those as empty with a suppressed flag rather than as zero, and never impute a replacement.