OEWS Geographic Granularity

OEWS provides occupation-level wage and employment data at national, state, and metropolitan/nonmetropolitan area levels, roughly 530 distinct geographic areas. This is unusually granular for federal labor statistics.

The catch: smaller geographies mean smaller samples, which means more data suppression. Detailed occupation × geography combinations often show dashes instead of estimates because the sample can’t support publication-quality precision.

The pattern I keep encountering: the more specific the question (“What do UX researchers earn in the Portland metro area?”), the more likely you’ll hit suppression limits. National and state-level data are reliably complete; metro-level data gets spotty for less common occupations.

Related:, 00-source—bls-oews