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Bureau of Labor Statistics > Current Employment Statistics (State and Metro Area) > Data > Tables & Maps

CES State and Area benchmark revisions

The CES survey, also known as the payroll or establishment survey, is a federal and state cooperative program that provides timely estimates of payroll employment, hours, and earnings for states and areas by sampling the population of employers. To control for both sampling and non-sampling error inherent in any survey, CES payroll employment estimates are benchmarked annually to employment counts from a census of the employer population. These counts are derived primarily from employment data provided in unemployment insurance (UI) tax reports that nearly all employers are required to file with state workforce agencies. The UI tax reports are collected, reviewed, and edited as part of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) program.

The benchmark adjustment, a standard part of the CES survey estimation process, is a once-a-year re-anchoring of the sample-based employment estimates to full population counts available principally through Unemployment Insurance (UI) tax records filed by employers with state labor market information agencies. The difference between the population counts and the sample-based employment estimates for any given month is referred to as the benchmark revision.

For a given benchmark, the revisions affect all not seasonally adjusted data for the most recent 21-month span of previously published data (for benchmark 2025, April 2024 to December 2025), all seasonally adjusted data for the most recent 5-year span (for benchmark 2025, January 2021 to December 2025), and select series as far back as 1990.

CES State and Area publishes an annual benchmark article summarizing the impact of benchmark revisions across states and metropolitan areas. These articles are available on the archived CES State and Area benchmark articles page. Beginning with benchmark year 2025, CES State and Area began publishing a downloadable file containing the revisions for all series and months. Each dataset contains the following variables listed in Table 1.

Table 1. Variables in downloadable revisions data files
Variable name	Description
SERIES_ID	20-digit series code. More information on interpreting CES State and Area series IDs is available on the CES State and Area series structure page.
STATE_FIPS_CODE	2-digit state FIPS code, identical to the 4th-5th characters of the SERIES_ID. See downloadable list of state FIPS codes.
AREA_FIPS_CODE	5-digit area FIPS code, identical to the 6th-10th characters of the SERIES_ID. See downloadable list of area FIPS codes.
SERIES_CODE	8-digit CES series code, identical to the 11th-18th characters of the SERIES_ID. See downloadable list of series codes.
DATA_TYPE_CODE	2-digit CES series code, identical to the 19th-20th characters of the SERIES_ID. See downloadable list of datatype codes.
YEAR	4-digit year of the published data value
MONTH	2-digit month of the published data value
AS_PREVIOUSLY_PUBLISHED_BMRKyyyy-1	Value as previously published in the previous benchmark year (yyyy-1), last published with the December release before the benchmark release.
AS_REVISED_BMRKyyyy	Value as revised for the benchmark year (yyyy), published with the benchmark release.

Downloadable files
Benchmark year¹	Prior benchmark year²	Downloadable ZIP file
2025	2024	bmrk2025-revisions.zip (52 MB)
Footnotes: ¹ Benchmark year corresponds to the AS_REVISED_BMRKyyyy column in each data file. ² Prior benchmark year corresponds to the AS_PREVIOUSLY_PUBLISHED_BMRKyyyy-1 column in each data file.

Last modified date: April 16, 2026