Employment and wages (QCEW)
Employment and wages covered by state unemployment insurance laws, compiled from employer reports and covering roughly 95 percent of US jobs. Annual averages, total covered (all ownership sectors combined) and by NAICS supersector.
Publisher
- Organization
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Publisher’s dataset
- Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, annual averages
- File or API used
- https://data.bls.gov/cew/data/files/2025/csv/2025_annual_by_area.zip
- Retrieval script
scripts/fetch-bls-qcew.py- Methodology
- https://www.bls.gov/cew/overview.htm
Coverage
- Geography
- Nation, states, and Idaho's 44 counties
- Time coverage
- 2001-2025 (avg_annual_wage, covered_employment); 2004 and 2014-2025 (industry breakdown)
- Update frequency
- Annual
- Published
- 2026
- Retrieved
- September 8, 2026
- License
- The compiled file on this page is CC BY 4.0. The underlying records: Public domain. U.S. federal government work.
Measures
| Measure | What it measures | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Average annual wage | Total covered wages divided by total covered average annual employment, all ownership sectors and industries combined. | usd |
| Covered employment | Average annual employment covered by state unemployment insurance laws, all ownership sectors and industries combined. | people |
| Employment by industry | Average annual covered employment by NAICS supersector, all ownership sectors combined. | people |
| Average annual wage by industry | Average annual wage by NAICS supersector, all ownership sectors combined. | usd |
Caveats
- avg_annual_wage and covered_employment are "Total Covered" (own_code 0): federal, state and local government plus private employment combined, all industries, at BLS aggregation level 10 (national), 50 (state) or 70 (county).
- employment_by_industry and avg_annual_wage_by_industry use the 12-category NAICS supersector breakdown (aggregation level 13 nationally, 53 for Idaho), not the coarser 2-category domain level or the finer 21-category NAICS sector level, and cover Idaho and the US only, for 2004 and every year 2014-2025.
- QCEW does not publish a combined-ownership (own_code 0) row at the industry-breakdown level, only at the total-all-industries level. employment_by_industry sums annual_avg_emplvl across the four ownership sectors (federal, state, local, private); avg_annual_wage_by_industry divides the ownership-summed total_annual_wages by that same summed employment. Both are BLS's own published figures recombined by this puller's arithmetic, not independently estimated.
- avg_annual_pay in the source is already rounded to the nearest dollar; avg_annual_wage_by_industry (a puller computation, see above) is rounded to the nearest dollar to match.
- A row QCEW suppresses for confidentiality (a non-blank disclosure_code) is omitted rather than estimated; Idaho's supersector breakdown can therefore have fewer than 12 industries in a given year.
- Idaho Department of Labor (lmi.idaho.gov) republishes QCEW figures for Idaho industries and wages; no disagreement with BLS's own numbers was found or is expected, since Idaho LMI is not an independent survey of this data.
Pages built on this dataset
Downloads
How to cite
Understand Idaho, “Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, annual averages”, compiled from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, annual averages. Retrieved September 8, 2026. https://understandidaho.com/data/bls-qcew/. CC BY 4.0.
Cite U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics directly for the figures themselves.
This page was last updated .