Question & Answer

	What is LEHD?
	What is LED?
	What is the difference between LEHD and LED?
	What are the QWI?
	Why aren't QWI data available for all states?
	What types of employment are included in the QWI?
	I'm looking at some QWI data and see that some numbers have been flagged with codes - what do these codes mean?
	Is there a data dictionary available for the QWI?
	Can I download all the QWI data for a county from the website?

What is LEHD?

Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) is an innovative program within the U.S. Census Bureau. We use modern statistical and computing techniques to combine federal and state administrative data on employers and employees with core Census Bureau censuses and surveys while protecting the confidentiality of people and firms that provide the data.

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What is LED?

Local Employment Dynamics (LED) is a voluntary partnership between state labor market information agencies and the U.S. Census Bureau to develop new information about local labor market conditions at low cost, with no added respondent burden, and with the same confidentiality protections afforded census and survey data.

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What is the difference between LEHD and LED?

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What are the QWI?

The Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) are a set of economic indicators -- including employment, job creation, wages, and worker turnover -- that can be queried by different levels of geography -- state, county, metro, and workforce investment area -- as well as by detailed industry, gender, and age of workers. You can query the data directly by using the QWI Online tool on this site.

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Why aren't QWI data available for all states?

QWI data are available for all states that are LED-state partners, however, not every state is currently a LED-state partner. A list of LED state partners can be found here. New partner states with data currently in production will have data available on the website as soon as production is complete. Information on how to become a state partner is available here.

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What types of employment are included in the QWI?

The QWI are built upon wage records in the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system and information from state ES-202 data. The universe of QWI data is UI-covered earnings. UI coverage is broad, covering over 90% of total wage and salary civilian jobs.

When QWI private industry employment numbers are compared with other employment data, exclusions to UI coverage should be taken into account. Federal government employment is not generally included. Exempted employment varies slightly from state to state due to variations in state unemployment laws, but generally also excludes many farmers and agricultural employees, domestic workers, self-employed non-agricultural workers, members of the Armed Services, some state and local government employees as well as certain types of nonprofit employers and religious organizations (which are given a choice of coverage or noncoverage in a number of states).

A more in-depth discussion of UI-coverage issues is available in the technical paper "Employment that is not covered by state unemployment" [PDF; File Size: 218KB]

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I'm looking at some QWI data and see that some numbers have been flagged with codes - what do these codes mean?

The LED program uses noise addition methodology to protect tabular information. These flags indicate data cells that have had noise added or have been suppressed to protect the confidentially of reporting units. More information on these techniques can be found under the discussion of confidentiality on this site. The following is a summary of the codes used in the QWI:

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Is there a data dictionary available for the QWI?

A list of detailed definitions for the variables on QWI Online can be found in Appendix A in Abowd, Stephens and Vilhuber (2006) technical documentation paper [PDF; File Size: 760KB]. To simply view the definitions, Appendix A is available here [PDF; File Size: 272KB]. For a more general and less detailed list of definitions, a less comprehensive list of definitions provided by Cynthia Tauber and Erika McEntarfer is also available [PDF; File Size: 76KB]

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Can I download all the QWI data for a county from the website?

You can download the 8 indicators that are available on the website using the following steps:

1. After you have chosen the county that you are interested in, click on "View Detailed Comparison Reports" at the bottom of the screen.
2. You will then see a second table that shows three selection fields: Pivot column; data rows; years. To select all fields, hit shift and left mouse button when you're in the data row selection field. To select some, but not all fields, hit ctrl and left mouse button when selecting the fields that you want. The same holds for years. You can choose only one age/sex/age group or year to display on the pivot table.
3. Once you've selected the fields you want, click on the download dataset option to the top left of the table.

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