Accessible jobs
An estimate of how many jobs sit within commuting reach of a tract, and how that pool has grown.
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Most people do not work in the tract they live in. A tract with no employer inside it can still sit twenty minutes from a large employment centre, and a tract with a single big depot on it can be otherwise isolated. Accessible jobs describes the first situation: the size of the job pool a resident of the tract can plausibly reach, rather than the number of jobs standing inside its boundary.
The underlying counts are the Census Bureau's. LODES Workplace Area Characteristics totals "jobs by work Census Block" (LODES Dataset Structure, Version 8.4), which is what makes a reachability measure possible at all: every job has a location. How far a tract reaches, and how much weight a distant job carries relative to a near one, is our own estimate and is not published by the Bureau. The idea it follows is the same one behind the Bureau's own OnTheMap tool, which reports the jobs lying within a travel distance of a point.
Metrics in this family#
Accessible job level
The size of the reachable job pool at the most recent year available for the tract. Because this quantity spans several orders of magnitude between rural tracts and central-city tracts, it is compared across places on a logarithmic scale.
Accessible job growth, 5-year
The average annual rate of change in that pool between 2018 and 2023.
Accessible job growth, recent
The average annual rate of change between 2021 and 2023. The two windows deliberately skip 2020 as a starting point, since a 2020 anchor would measure recovery from the pandemic trough rather than underlying growth.
Considerations#
A tract's reachable area does not stop at a state line, so a state that leaves the LEHD partnership can silently remove jobs from its neighbours' pools. Alaska has published no workplace data since 2016 and Michigan none since 2021. Where too large a share of a tract's reachable pool falls in a state that stopped publishing, we report no growth figure rather than a decline that is an artefact of the gap. Tracts near those borders are therefore often blank.
The job counts underneath are protected. The Bureau's disclosure avoidance methods "distort values by infusing noise at the employer and establishment levels and by weighting to control totals," with the same noise factor applied to a worksite across years "so that longitudinal changes in employment are not distorted" (LODES Design and Methodology Report). Aggregating thousands of blocks into a reachable pool makes that noise small in relative terms here.
Reach is measured geographically, not by road, transit or travel time. Two tracts the same distance from an employment centre score alike even where one has a bridge, a train or a motorway and the other does not.
References#
- 1LODES Dataset Structure, Version 8.4https://lehd.ces.census.gov/data/lodes/LODES8/LODESTechDoc8.4.pdf
- 2LODES Design and Methodology Reporthttps://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2025/adrm/ces/CES-WP-25-52.pdf