Overview

The Current Employment Statistics program is a monthly survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The survey provides employment, hours and earnings estimates based on payroll records of business establishments.

Data Available

The data from the Current Employment Statistics survey include series for total employment; production and nonsupervisory employees; women employees; and average hourly earnings, average weekly hours, average weekly earnings, and average weekly overtime hours in manufacturing industries for both all employees and production and nonsupervisory employees.

For all employees and production and nonsupervisory employees, over 1,900 published monthly employment series are available. The series for all employees include over 1,100 industries at various levels of aggregation.

Approximately 3,700 series for average weekly earnings, average hourly earnings, average weekly hours, and, in manufacturing, average weekly overtime hours are available and cover about 750 industries.

Most employment series begin in 1990, although employment by major industry sector is available since 1939.

For major industries, about 290 series of seasonally adjusted data are available.

Over 550 special derivative series such as indexes and constant dollar series are also available.

Coverage

Payroll employment includes nonagricultural industries.

Hours and earnings are produced for all private-sector employees on business payrolls and also for production and nonsupervisory employees. Production and nonsupervisory employees include production employees in mining, logging, and manufacturing, construction employees in construction, and nonsupervisory employees in private service-providing industries.

Reference Period

Pay period including the 12th of the month (varies by reporting establishment).

Source of Data

Current Employment Statistics Program, a Federal-State cooperative program; survey based on approximately 140,000 businesses and government agencies representing approximately 410,000 worksites throughout the United States.

Industry Classification

CES data are classified according to the 2007 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).

Forms of Publication

Monthly news releases - The Employment Situation-3 weeks after the reference week (usually the first Friday of each month), and Real Earnings - coincident with Consumer Price Index release. Electronic access available.

Monthly web-only publication - Employment and Earnings Online.

Internet - LABSTAT main database

Uses

The first economic indicator of current economic trends each month, together with the unemployment rate.

  • Health of the economy (employment).
  • Earnings trends and wage-push inflation (average hourly earnings).
  • Short-term fluctuations in demand (average weekly hours).

Input into other major economic indicators:

  • Personal Income (aggregate earnings).
  • Industrial Production (aggregate hours in manufacturing, mining, and public utilities).
  • Index of Leading Economic Indicators (average weekly hours of production employees in manufacturing).
  • Index of Coincident Indicators (employment)
  • Productivity measures (aggregate hours).

Public policy.

Wage negotiations.

Economic research and planning.

Industry studies.

 

Last Modified Date: February 5, 2010