Public administration
The share of jobs within commuting reach of a tract that are in public administration, and how that share has moved over five years.
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Of all the jobs within commuting reach of a tract, the share that are in public administration. This describes the composition of the nearby job market rather than its size.
The Census Bureau defines the sector as consisting of "establishments of federal, state, and local government agencies that administer, oversee, and manage public programs and have executive, legislative, or judicial authority over other institutions within a given area." Those agencies "also set policy, create laws, adjudicate civil and criminal legal cases, and provide for public safety and for national defense," and in general "oversee governmental programs and activities that are not performed by private establishments" (2022 NAICS Manual).
This sector is narrower than government employment. The Bureau states plainly that "ownership is not a criterion for classification in NAICS," so government establishments producing services that private firms also produce are classified with those private firms: public school districts appear under educational services, public hospitals under health care, and a municipal transit agency under transportation. What remains here is the governing function itself — administration, courts, public safety, defense — which is why this share tends to be highest around seats of government, courthouse districts, and federal installations, and is a statement about a place's institutional role rather than about its industry base.
Metrics in this family#
Considerations#
Jobs are counted where the work is located, not where the worker lives.
The Census Bureau protects employer confidentiality before publication. The disclosure limitation applied to "the workplace component of LODES uses employer-level input noise infusion" (McKinney et al., CES-WP-20-30), so published small-area values are perturbed relative to the underlying counts.
Federal employment is a special case in this source. The program's coverage was originally limited to jobs covered by state unemployment insurance, and federal workers are included from the 2010 data year onward (OnTheMap Data Overview). Both years used here fall after that change, so the five-year comparison is not affected by it, but longer comparisons drawn from the same source elsewhere would be. The reference period is the second quarter of each year.
Two gaps carry through from the published files: Alaska has no workplace data after 2016 and Michigan none after 2021. Tracts there carry no value rather than a zero.
The twenty sector shares sum to one, so movement here is always relative to the rest of the local mix.
Birdseye derives these shares from the sector job counts the Census Bureau publishes; the shares themselves are not a published series.
References#
- 12022 NAICS Manualhttps://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
- 2McKinney et al., CES-WP-20-30https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2020/CES-WP-20-30.pdf
- 3OnTheMap Data Overviewhttps://lehd.ces.census.gov/doc/help/onthemap/OnTheMapDataOverview.pdf