BLS Local Area Unemployment Statistics

Monthly county estimates from January 2015 through the most recent release.

"Most recent release" is not the same as today. The Bureau reports that "LAUS statewide estimates are published about 3 weeks following the reference month, while LAUS substate data are published about 4–5 weeks following the reference month" (LAUS Questions and Answers). The end of any series therefore trails the present date.

Published figures also change after first release. "At the beginning of each calendar year, the LAUS program revises up to five years of previous data to incorporate new inputs and population data," after which "local area Handbook estimates then are revised and re-adjusted to sum to the revised state estimates" (LAUS Estimation Methodology).

County is the finest geography the program publishes for these measures. No tract-level series exists.

Birdseye displays census tracts. Because every census tract lies entirely inside one county, each tract carries the value published for the county containing it. This is exact containment rather than an estimate: nothing is allocated, split, or apportioned. The limitation is that unemployment varies within a county and the county figure does not describe that variation. A prosperous tract and a struggling tract in the same county show the same number. See how we combine geographies.

Coverage reaches 83,529 of the 85,395 census tracts we carry. The gap is tracts whose county or county equivalent has no published series.

County figures are not tabulated from a survey of counties. The Bureau describes the Handbook method as "a building-block approach using data from several sources—including the Current Population Survey, the Current Employment Statistics program, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, and unemployment insurance systems—to produce labor force estimates at the substate level" (LAUS Questions and Answers). County estimates are then controlled so that they sum to the modelled statewide totals.

The concepts match the national unemployment rate: the Bureau defines the unemployment rate as "the unemployed percent of the civilian labor force," and counts as unemployed those who "had no employment during the reference week, were available for work, except for temporary illness, and had made specific efforts to find employment some time during the 4 week-period ending with the reference week."

Substate estimates are not seasonally adjusted. Seasonal adjustment is applied to states, census regions and divisions, and a handful of large substate areas (Seasonal Adjustment), so month-to-month movement in a county series carries weather, harvest, holiday, and school-calendar effects that are not signals about the labor market.

Because the county estimates rest on administrative counts and modelled components rather than a local sample, they can move sharply in small counties where a single large employer dominates the covered workforce.

Figures shown here are our own estimates derived from that data. Per the BLS terms of service, BLS.gov cannot vouch for the data or analyses derived from these data after the data have been retrieved from BLS.gov.