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Employment Cost Index
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Introducing 2025 fixed employment weights and removing Workers’ Compensation costs from the Employment Cost Index (ECI)
With the January 2027 release of December 2026 data, the ECI will introduce new 2025 fixed employment weights and remove workers’ compensation costs from ECI calculations.
New 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) Weights
The ECI will introduce new 2025 fixed employment weights to replace the 2021 OEWS weights used between December 2022 and September 2026. The ECI weights are updated periodically to reflect the more current industry and occupational employment distributions.
The primary source of the new weights for the ECI is the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) employment counts, benchmarked to the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) employment totals by industry.
Removing Workers’ Compensation Costs
Workers’ compensation (WC) is one of 18 employer-provided benefits for which information is collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) under the National Compensation Survey (NCS) program.
Workers’ compensation suffers from a substantially lower item response rate than other NCS benefits. Because workers’ compensation only makes up about 1 percent of total compensation, BLS has decided to focus its efforts on collecting benefits which make up a greater share of total compensation and will remove workers’ compensation data from the NCS. For more information, see Removing workers’ compensation costs from the National Compensation Survey.
A Federal Register notice was published seeking comments on proposed changes to the survey.
More Information
This notice will be updated with additional information once it is available. For comments or questions on the Employment Cost Index (ECI), please contact us at ncsinfo@bls.gov or through the Information Request form.
For more information on the history of weights and classification systems in the ECI, see Reweighting and Recoding in the ECI.
Last Modified Date: February 11, 2026