U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Department of Labor Logo United States Department of Labor
Dot gov

The .gov means it's official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you're on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Local Area Unemployment Statistics
LAU LAU Program Links

Smoothed Seasonally Adjusted Metropolitan Area Estimates

Notice

These data do not yet reflect the revisions to the not-seasonally-adjusted estimates that were issued on March 19 (for January 1990 through December 2009) and April 16 (for January 2010 through December 2020). The seasonal-adjustment models are undergoing a re-fitting process, and the data in the files below will be updated once this process has been completed.

Effective with the release of metropolitan area data for May 2011, the Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) program began to publish seasonally-adjusted civilian labor force and unemployment estimates for all metropolitan areas and metropolitan divisions. These data are updated via the downloadable files below on the day of each Metropolitan Area Employment and Unemployment news release. (See www.bls.gov/schedule/news_release/metro.htm for a schedule of upcoming release dates.) The files contain estimates from January 1990 forward. The statistical technique used to adjust estimates is SEATS, or Signal Extraction in ARIMA (Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average) Time Series. Following seasonal adjustment, the data are smoothed using a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) filter. For each area and division, separate SEATS specifications are used to seasonally adjust employment and unemployment levels, from which civilian labor force levels and unemployment rates are then derived. The SEATS specifications also vary by decade (1990-99 and 2000 forward), in order to minimize performance problems stemming from decennial discontinuities in the not-seasonally-adjusted input data.

For the sake of completeness, data for model-based areas and divisions are included in the files below. These are the Cleveland-Elyria, OH, and Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI, metropolitan areas and the Chicago-Naperville-Arlington Heights, IL; Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, CA; Miami-Miami Beach-Kendall, FL; and Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, WA, metropolitan divisions. Data for these model-based areas and divisions first are seasonally adjusted using an X-11 type of filter then are smoothed using an RKHS filter, as are the model-based data for states.

Downloadable Data Files

  • Table 1. Civilian labor force and unemployment by metropolitan area, seasonally adjusted (TXT 23.9M) (ZIP 9.1M)
  • Table 2. Civilian labor force and unemployment by selected metropolitan area and metropolitan division, seasonally adjusted (TXT 3.1M) (ZIP 1.1M)

 

Last Modified Date: April 16, 2021