Covered employment by sector (private): methodology

Covered employment by NAICS sector, from the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages — one series per sector per area.

Private ownership only, and this is the important caveat. QCEW publishes sector detail only broken out by ownership: there is no aggregation level that combines private, federal, state and local employment within a single sector. Adding the four ourselves would be our arithmetic rather than the source's, and it would be quietly wrong wherever one ownership is suppressed. So these series cover private employment, and they do not sum to our headline covered employment series, which includes government. Public-sector jobs are missing from every sector here; NAICS 92, public administration, is absent entirely because it has no private employment.

Suppressed sectors are published as zero by BLS and stored as empty here, flagged suppressed. In a small county most sectors are suppressed in most quarters: Eureka County discloses about twelve of the twenty. A series that is suppressed throughout still appears, because "withheld to protect an employer" is a different fact from "no such jobs here", and only one of the two is true.

Sectors are the source's own, including the combined codes BLS publishes as one sector (31-33 Manufacturing, 44-45 Retail trade, 48-49 Transportation and warehousing) and 99 Unclassified, which holds establishments whose industry was not determined.

Counting, revision, preliminary quarters and the meaning of a job are as for the headline covered employment series.