Technical Note
TECHNICAL NOTE
Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC) measures the average cost to employers for wages
and salaries and benefits per employee hour worked.
ECEC includes the civilian economy, which includes data from both private industry and state and local
government. Excluded from private industry are the self-employed and farm and private household
workers. Federal government workers are excluded from the public sector. The private industry series
and the state and local government series provide data for the two sectors separately.
The cost levels for this quarter were collected from a probability sample of approximately 47,400
occupations selected from a sample of about 9,500 establishments in private industry and approximately
9,200 occupations from a sample of about 1,400 establishments in state and local government.
Comparing private and public sector data
Compensation cost levels in state and local government should not be directly compared with levels in
private industry. Differences between these sectors stem from factors such as variation in work activities
and occupational structures. Manufacturing and sales, for example, make up a large part of private
industry work activities but are rare in state and local government. Professional and administrative
support occupations (including teachers) account for two-thirds of the state and local government
workforce, compared with one-half of private industry.
ECEC quarterly publication focus
ECEC news releases are published quarterly, providing civilian, private industry, and state and local
government cost per hour estimates as well as additional detail on a specific compensation cost topic of
interest. This quarter focuses on retirement and savings costs in private industry. Topics of news releases
for the upcoming reference periods are as follows:
* September 2012—Compensation costs in state and local government
* December 2012—Paid leave and legally required benefit costs in private industry
ECEC detailed information and measures
For detailed information on the Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, see Chapter 8, National
Compensation Measures of the BLS Handbook of Methods at:
http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/pdf/homch8.pdf.
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Last Modified Date: September 11, 2012