US Labor Force Participation

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Ready to use this data? See the Core LMI reference documentation to get started.

Description

This dataset contains employment, unemployment, and population figures by area. Together these metrics can be used to create a labor force participation rate, which measures how much of the population either has a job, or does not have a job but is seeking one. Producing a labor force participation rate can be done by dividing the sum of employment and unemployment by population:

labor force participation rate = (Employment + Unemployment) / WorkingAgePopulation

This dataset is monthly, and is provided for each month from January 2010 through the latest month available in the version selected. Data is available at the nation, state, MSA, and county levels.

When requesting an MSA code as the area constraint in a query, the code must be prepended by MSA (e.g. for MSA code 10540, use 'MSA10540').

Unemployed persons are defined by the BLS (from which Emsi collects unemployment data) as 'all persons who had no employment during the reference week, were available for work, except for temporary illness, and had made specific efforts to find employment sometime during the 4-week period ending with the reference week. Persons who were waiting to be recalled from a job from which they had been laid off need not have been looking for work to be classified as unemployed' (https://www.bls.gov/lau/laufaq.htm#Q03).

Use Cases

Questions answered by this dataset:

• What is the labor force participation rate for Indianapolis?
• How has the unemployment rate changed over time in Portland?
• What cities in the US have the highest labor force participation rate? What cities have the lowest rate?
• How does the LFPR for the working age population differ from the LFPR for everyone 16 and older?

Metrics

• Employment: The number of jobs in the area.
• Unemployment: The number of unemployed people in the area.
• UnemploymentRate: Unemployment/(Empoyment+Unemployment)
• WorkingAgePopulation: The civilian non-institutional population aged 16-64 living in the area.
• LaborForcePopulation: The civilian non-institutional population aged 16+ living in the area.
• WorkingAgeLFPR: (Empoyment+Unemployment)/WorkingAgePopulation
• LFPR: (Empoyment+Unemployment)/LaborForcePopulation
• EmployablePopulation (deprecated name): The civilian non-institutional population aged 16-64 living in the area.
• LaborForceParticipationRate (deprecated name): (Empoyment+Unemployment)/WorkingAgePopulation

Filters

• Area (Nation, State, MSA, County)
• Year
• Month

Core LMI Metadata