Occupational Employment Statistics (OES)

OES Overview

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses data from Occupational Employment Statistics to provide employment counts and salary estimates for over 800 occupations at multiple geographical levels. OES data informs state education and workforce development plans, as well as a number of other projects including the calculation of reimbursement rates for Medicare and other marketplace analyses.

Methodology and content

The survey is conducted semi-annually, with released data estimates comprised of three years of surveys. Each survey is built from a sample of about 200,000 businesses. Once six surveys over three years are combined, approximately 1.1 million different businesses have been surveyed, which directly covers about 57% of the total employment in the US. The resulting employment data is then aggregated by job classification and industry at the national, state, and metro/nonmetropolitan region level, provided there are sufficient responses in the smaller aggregations to ensure accuracy. As a result of this data being collected exclusively from established business locations, smaller businesses are less represented than larger ones. Self employment and agricultural employment statistics are not measured by this data. (Agricultural employment statistics are handled by the USDA through the National Agricultural Statistics Service, and Ididio does not yet include their data.)

When surveyed, each business location chooses the industry code according to a NAICS classification that best describes the physical location's primary activity, and each employee is classified according to the most appropriate SOC codes job code. While Ididio focuses primarily on job classifications, wage and employment counts are available for detailed industry levels through the primary BLS source.

Finding the data

Occupational Employment data are downloaded from BLS. We last retrieved data covering the 2019 fiscal year on April 27, 2020.

This new data is based on the new SOC codes that form the foundation of Ididio's career descriptions; however, in many instances several career specialties have been combined to create Occupational Employment estimates. You can find the details of those hybrid definitions on the BLS OE site. In these cases, we share the combined hybrid totals and salaries for the more specific occupation designation that is the basis of our career page.