BLS QCEW Employment Data: Working with County FIPS Codes

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) covers approximately 95% of US jobs, published quarterly at the county level. It includes employment counts, wages, and establishment counts by industry (NAICS code) for every county in the US — all keyed to 5-digit FIPS codes. For anyone analyzing regional labor markets, QCEW is an essential dataset, and FIPS fluency is required to use it effectively.

The QCEW file structure uses a field called area_fips which contains the 5-digit county FIPS code for county-level records, or special codes like "US000" for national totals and "CSXXXX" for combined statistical areas. When filtering to county-level records, select rows where area_fips matches the pattern of 5 digits (or use own_code to filter by ownership). You can verify any county code against our county FIPS reference.

A common use case is comparing employment across counties within a metro area. For the Seattle metro, you'd pull QCEW records for the component counties of the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue MSA — including King (53033), Snohomish (53061), and Pierce (53053). The MSA FIPS code (42660) doesn't appear in QCEW directly; you need to know the component counties to aggregate correctly.

The BLS also publishes the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), which uses MSA codes rather than county FIPS — another reason it's valuable to understand both county and MSA FIPS geography. Our federal datasets guide covers BLS data products in detail. For quick county lookups while building your analysis, the search tool is the fastest way to confirm a FIPS code.