Data Homepage Tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to quickly get tables of the Bureau’s most requested statistics or create your own customized data tables.

Start by clicking on the "Databases & Tables" tab at the top of the BLS homepage.

Information on this page is organized by Subject.

You can scroll down the page to the topic you want, or simply click on one of the links in the "On This Page" section to jump directly to that topic. For example, if you wanted to find the number of persons employed in your state or metro area, you would click on the "Employment" link.

Within each subject area, you can click on the "Top Picks" icon to quickly retrieve the most commonly requested BLS data on a topic.

More extensive and customized data searches also are available.

Click on the "One-Screen Data Search" icon to use a simple form to get tables of the data you want. To use this tool you must have a Java-enabled internet browser.

If you do not have a Java-enabled browser, you can use the "Multi-Screen Data Search" tool to retrieve the same data tables.

Step-by-step instructions for these search tools are available by clicking on the "Tutorials" icons at the top of each section.

Entire datasets may be extracted, as well, by clicking on the "Text File" icon.

Links to additional data resources are available in the left menu at the top of the page.

For example, click on "Economy At A Glance" to find the most current statistics on the labor force and jobs at the national, regional, state, and metropolitan levels plus consumer price indexes for the nation, regions, and about two dozen metropolitan areas.

This concludes the tutorial. Thank you for visiting the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ website.