BLS OEWS Wage Data: Decoding MSA and State FIPS

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey is the primary source of occupation-level wage data in the US, covering approximately 800 detailed occupations at the national, state, and metropolitan area levels. Published annually, OEWS is used for salary benchmarking, labor market research, career counseling, and policy analysis. The geographic levels used in OEWS data are states (2-digit FIPS), MSAs (5-digit CBSA codes), and a handful of non-metropolitan area aggregates.

OEWS area codes follow specific conventions: national data uses "000000", state data uses the 2-digit state FIPS code zero-padded to 6 digits (e.g., "530000" for Washington state), and MSA data uses the 5-digit CBSA code. The Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue MSA (42660) would appear as area code "42660" in OEWS files. For researchers working with OEWS, verifying MSA codes against the current OMB delineation is important — when MSA definitions change, affected MSAs may be split, merged, or renamed, changing which code to use.

OEWS doesn't publish county-level wage data — the survey sample isn't large enough to support reliable county estimates for most occupations. For county-level wage analysis, the BLS QCEW is the alternative, though it measures average wages rather than occupational wages. Combining OEWS MSA wages with QCEW county employment counts is a common approach: apply the MSA occupational wage distribution to county employment totals, weighted by the county's share of MSA employment.

When using OEWS for salary benchmarking, the Seattle MSA wages for software developers, for instance, reflect the concentration of high-paying technology employers and are not representative of wages in the component counties' smaller employers. Understanding the geographic aggregation helps interpret the data correctly. Use our federal data overview and MSA pages to navigate BLS geography, and the search tool for quick code lookups.