Average weekly wage by sector (private): methodology
Provenance for the series on Average weekly wage by sector (private). This page has its own URL so it can be cited alongside a figure.
- Dataset identifier
- qcew_avg_weekly_wage_by_sector
- Update cadence
- Quarterly, ~6 month lag
- Unit
- usd
- Coverage
- 351 series · 2014-01-01 to 2026-01-01
- Vintage published here
- 2026-10-30
Average weekly wage by NAICS sector, from the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages — one series per sector per area.
Private ownership only, for the reason set out on the sector employment page: QCEW publishes no sector that combines private and government employment, and summing ownerships ourselves would be a computation that breaks wherever one is suppressed.
Derivation, the breadth of "wages", nominal dollars and the preliminary quarter are all as for the headline average weekly wage series, which documents them at length. One thing is worth repeating here: because the figure includes bonuses and exercised stock options, a sector with few employers in a small county can swing hard between quarters without anyone's pay changing.
Suppressed sector-quarters are stored as empty with a suppressed flag rather
than as the zero in the file.
Revisions and vintages
Every observation we store carries the date it was published, and a revision lands as a new vintage rather than overwriting the old one. The figures on this site are the most recent vintage, stamped above; a figure you cited earlier stays retrievable even after the source restates it.
The full series, including the flag and vintage of every value, is in the CSV.