Experimental All Employee Hours and Earnings Series by State from the Current Employment Statistics Program

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Click on any of the states below to access experimental all employee hours and earnings data:

A single text file containing All Employee Hours and Earnings data for all states and datatypes (i.e., average hourly earnings, average weekly earnings, average weekly hours), is available: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/sa/aeppdata.txt. Supporting documentation, such as mapping files, is available at ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/sa; descriptions of the documentation files are in the README file.

Background

The Current Employment Statistics (CES) program began work in 2005 to add new series on hours and earnings.  New series have been developed to measure the average hourly earnings, average weekly hours, and gross monthly earnings of all nonfarm private sector employees.  Additionally, CES is adding average overtime hours in manufacturing.  Historically, the CES program has published average hours and earnings series for production workers in the goods-producing industries and non-supervisory workers in the service-providing industries.  These workers account for about 80 percent of total private nonfarm employment.

The new hours and earnings series are more comprehensive in coverage, thereby providing improved information for analyzing economic trends and improved input to productivity and personal income series.

Experimental designation and future publication plans

BLS is designating the first release of these new series as experimental because of the limited experience to date with the editing and review of the sample reports and the resultant estimates.  BLS began the first collection of the all employee payroll, hours, and gross monthly earnings data from respondents late in 2005.  There is not yet enough historical information to apply all of the edit and review techniques used in the published CES data to these new series, nor is there sufficient data to allow seasonal adjustment of the new series.  

The first release of experimental State series on March 11, 2008, included level estimates at a total private sector level and limited industry detail from January 2007 through December 2007.  Each month the experimental estimates will be released on the same date as the Regional and State Employment and Unemployment news release. Unlike the published CES series, these experimental series will be published only as final sample-based estimates; there will be no preliminary estimates.  For example, March estimates will be published in May.  As BLS and data users gain more experience with these new data series, additional industry detail may be released, and publication of preliminary estimates may be added over the next 2 to 3 years.

By the end of 2009, BLS should have sufficient historical data to seasonally adjust the all employee payroll and hours series and is planning to publish them as official CES data in the Employment Situation news release and other BLS publications beginning in February 2010.  

Definitions and Methodology

In order to publish all employee average weekly hours, average hourly earnings, and average weekly earnings, BLS is collecting all employees total payroll and all employees total hours from survey respondents.  The definitions of these data items parallel the definitions used for the production worker payroll and hours data; the only difference is that they cover all employees rather than just production or non-supervisory workers.  See www.bls.gov/ces/idcf/forme_mp.pdf for a sample collection form.  Additionally, the same estimation formulas currently used for the published series on production and non-supervisory workers are used for the all employee hours and earnings series.  More detailed information on current estimation formulas can be found at www.bls.gov/web/cestn1.htm.

 

Last Modified Date: September 16, 2008