SOURCES, VERSIONS & WHAT CHANGED

2025 QCEW: source scope and preparation record

The scope and preparation of our first annual county employment and wage reference.

991,071county / industry / ownership rows

3,143observed counties and equivalents

273,531rows with disclosed employment and wages

717,540rows with suppressed employment and wages

Source year and ACD release

This is the first ACD preparation of 2025 BLS QCEW annual averages, captured October 17, 2026. It is not a new 2026 wage series or a comparison with a previous ACD edition. The retained source ZIP has an August 21, 2026 Last-Modified timestamp; we do not assert that timestamp as its publication date.

What the preparation adds

The main table selects six-digit county industry records by ownership in the 50 states and DC. Official labels, text identifiers, explicit units and disclosure statuses make these records ready for a documented join. All-industry county totals are separate. The source’s rounded annual averages and dollar values are preserved.

For source disclosure flag N, employment and wages become blank analytical values with a suppressed status; published establishment counts remain available. Unflagged zero stays zero. No missing county/industry combination is manufactured.

Source-row accounting

All 3,089,813 original records are accounted for in the retained preparation audit. The customer quality report includes these selected and excluded counts:

Selection outcome	Source records
county detail	991,071
county total	15,646
excluded aggregate level	1,817,249
excluded geography	45,089
excluded noncounty level	142,388
excluded unknown county	78,370

Classification and comparison limits

Industries use 2022 NAICS with BLS specialty-trade extensions and an explicit unclassified category. Connecticut uses planning regions. County Business Patterns 2023 uses 2017 NAICS, different program coverage and mid-March employment. These products can support related questions, but their values are not interchangeable. Do not use classification crosswalks as weights to allocate jobs or wages.

Reproducibility and future versions

The original ZIP, label tables, source documentation, lossless staging and preparation recipes are retained separately. Independent acceptance compares every delivered fact against original source cells. Processing improvements using these retained inputs are included for buyers; a future annual source edition may be sold separately after edition-specific access is implemented. No subscription or refresh date is promised.