BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics
Verified working Aug 19, 2026
Official U.S. wage and employment estimates by occupation and area.
The BLS OEWS portal publishes annual employment and wage estimates for roughly 830 occupations across the United States. Users can explore national, state, metropolitan, nonmetropolitan, and selected industry-level occupation data through tables, profiles, maps, charts, and related releases.
Why it stands out
- Produced by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics rather than a private salary survey vendor.
- Combines occupation, geography, and wage measures in one official source.
- Covers hundreds of standardized occupations, making comparisons more consistent across places.
- Includes methodology and documentation pages for users who need to cite or evaluate the estimates.
- Publishes notices for specific data issues or updates, not just headline releases.
Good to know
- OEWS figures are annual estimates, not real-time job-posting or current vacancy data.
- The data describe occupations and areas in aggregate, not individual employers or specific job offers.
- Coverage is centered on U.S. labor markets and BLS occupational definitions.
- Users should review posted notices because some releases include area- or occupation-specific updates.
Under the radar: Before citing the newest estimates, scan the OEWS Notices section for occupation- or location-specific corrections, since those can affect a narrow slice of the dataset without changing the whole release.
Photos
Workforce analysts, compensation researchers, and career counselors can use it to benchmark occupational pay with official U.S. labor statistics. Compare wages for the same occupation across states or metro areas. Find which occupations employ the most workers in a region or industry. Support grant proposals, labor-market reports, or policy briefs with cited government data. Check recent OEWS news releases for occupation-specific trends and highlights.
Annual occupation-level employment and wage estimates; national, state, metro, and nonmetro geographic coverage; national estimates by selected industries; one-screen data search, data tables, profiles, maps, and charts; publications, news releases, methodology documentation, and notices for data updates or corrections.
Technical Notes
- BLS provides a public data API for retrieving many BLS time-series datasets programmatically.
- OEWS data pages also provide structured data tables/downloadable files for analysis outside the website.
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