Local jobs
Growth in the number of jobs physically located inside a tract.
On this page
The number of jobs whose workplace falls inside the tract, and how that number has changed. The Census Bureau's Workplace Area Characteristics file totals "jobs by work Census Block" (LODES Dataset Structure, Version 8.4), and a tract is an exact grouping of blocks, so this count needs no estimation.
This is a measure of a place as a destination, not of its residents. Jobs here belong to whoever works in the tract, wherever they live. A tract whose count is rising is one where employers are opening or expanding on the ground: new offices, a distribution centre, a hospital wing, a strip of restaurants. A tract whose count is falling has lost them.
Local jobs and accessible jobs answer different questions and often disagree. A residential tract in a growing metro can have almost no jobs inside it while sitting inside an expanding regional labour market. A tract can also gain a single large employer and show sharp local growth in a region going nowhere.
Metrics in this family#
Local job growth, 5-year
trendThe average annual rate of change in jobs located in the tract between 2018 and 2023.
Local job growth, recent
trendThe same measure over 2021 to 2023. Neither window starts at 2020, because a 2020 starting point would measure rebound from the pandemic trough rather than sustained growth.
Considerations#
Because the counts are small at tract level, they move sharply. One employer opening or closing can swing a tract's growth rate by a large margin, and a tract with very few jobs to begin with can post an extreme rate off a trivial absolute change. Growth figures for low-job tracts should be read with that in mind.
The counts are also deliberately imprecise. The Bureau's disclosure avoidance methods "distort values by infusing noise at the employer and establishment levels and by weighting to control totals," and the same noise factor follows a worksite across years "so that longitudinal changes in employment are not distorted" (LODES Design and Methodology Report). That design protects trends better than levels, but small-count tracts remain the least reliable.
A workplace is recorded at the address the employer reported, which "may or may not be the actual location that a worker reports to most often." Employers with several sites sometimes file one address for all of them, which concentrates jobs at a headquarters tract that are worked elsewhere. The Bureau notes this is especially common among state and local governments and school districts, and that construction work is often carried out at temporary locations away from the reported address.
Coverage is limited to unemployment insurance covered wage and salary jobs. The self-employed, informal workers, the military, postal workers and some nonprofit employees are outside the universe entirely.
Alaska has published no workplace data since 2016 and Michigan none since 2021, so their windows ending in later years carry no value.
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