Main Overview

Survey Description: The Current Employment Statistics (CES) program provides estimates of employment, hours, and earnings information on a national basis and in considerable industry detail. The Bureau of Labor Statistics collects payroll data each month from a sample of business and government establishments in all nonfarm activities. Employment data include series for total employment, number of women employees, and number of production or nonsupervisory employees. Estimates of average hourly earnings, average weekly hours, average weekly earnings, and average weekly overtime hours are produced for both all employees and for production or nonsupervisory employees. Overtime hours are produced for manufacturing industries only. A sample of approximately 149,000 businesses and government agencies representing approximately 651,000 worksites throughout the United States is utilized for this monthly survey. The sample contains about 300,000 employer units. All employment, hours and earnings series are classified according to the 2012 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The industry code used in the survey corresponds to the NAICS code, except in those cases where multiple industries have been combined.

Summary of Data Available: For all employees, women employees, and production or nonsupervisory employees, CES publishes about 4,300 monthly series. The series for all employees cover more than 900 industries on both a seasonally adjusted and not seasonally adjusted basis. Approximately 2,500 series for AHE, AWH, and, in manufacturing, AWOH for both all employee and production and nonsupervisory employees are published monthly on a not seasonally adjusted basis and cover about 600 industries. About 5,800 seasonally adjusted employment, hours, and earnings series for AE, PE, and WE are published. Over 8,600 derivative series such as average weekly earnings (AWE), indexes, and constantdollar series for AE and PE are also published for approximately 600 industries. Most employment series begin in 1990, although some series, including industry supersectors, are available from 1939. Supersectors include: mining and logging; construction; manufacturing; trade, transportation, and utilities; information; financial activities; professional and business services, education and health services; leisure and hospitality, other services, and government.

Frequency of Observations: Data series are monthly in most cases; quarterly averages are available for total employment, average weekly hours, and average overtime hours, seasonally adjusted (datatypes 19, 20, 25, 36, and 37). Annual averages are available for all series that are not adjusted for seasonality (except for the 12-month diffusion index series).

Data Characteristics: Earnings are measured in dollars and are published to the nearest cent (two decimal places). Average weekly and overtime hours are measured in hours and are published to the nearest tenth of an hour (one decimal place). Employment is measured in thousands of workers and is stored with no decimal place for all supersectors and for both durable goods and nondurable goods in manufacturing. Employment for all other industries are stored to one decimal place. Special characteristics of the data are footnoted where necessary. For example; I indicates that the seasonally adjusted series is independently seasonally adjusted and not used in aggregating to higher summary industries. For all employees, higher summary series, such as total nonfarm, are aggregated up from the 3-digit NAICS level.

Long Description

Available at bls.gov 

Where to start

This  is the starting point for understanding and processing the data

More Information

• References: BLS Handbook of Methods, Chapter 2, "Employment, hours, and earnings from\ the establishment survey", https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/pdf/homch2.pdf 
• Frequency: Monthly
• Detailed Release Schedule: https://www.bls.gov/ces/ces_tabl.htm 

Contact Information

If you have questions about the source data, please see contact information at https://download.bls.gov/pub/time.series/ce/ce.contacts 

If you have any questions about the CloudFormation stack, Lambda code or any of the AWS services being used, please contact info@rearc.io.

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