Establishment count

Annual aggregate measures of establishment openings and closings, firm startups and shutdowns, employment, and job creation/destruction. The current 2023 release covers 1978–2023 for the 50 states and DC through national, state, county, CBSA, metro/non-metro, NAICS 2017, firm/establishment age, and size tabulations. A coordinated 56-file Puerto Rico extension covers 1998–2023 at 2-digit NAICS and specified geographies but is available only as CSV. Release documentation pins stateside geography to the 2023 vintage; the generic API geography metadata still reports referenceDate 2022, so consumers must retain this documented metadata conflict. Measures are annual March-to-March, not individual-business records. Historical values can receive minor revisions, with recent births and job flows especially revision-sensitive.

BLS aggregate BED product derived from longitudinally linked QCEW establishment records. It publishes quarterly/annual job-flow levels and rates for openings, expansions, closings, contractions, births and deaths, with employment and establishment-count measures by supported national/state, industry, firm-size and employment-change-size dimensions. Coordinated downloadable establishment-age and annual-opening-cohort survival tables add surviving counts, survivor employment, survival since birth, prior-year conditional survival and average survivor employment. API and text tables are delivery surfaces of one product.

Coordinated BLS QCEW public-data product publishing covered-establishment counts, monthly employment levels, quarterly and annual wage/contribution measures, average weekly wage and annual pay, location quotients, and over-year changes by industry, ownership, establishment size, and national/state/county/MSA or other published area. Area/industry CSV endpoints, quarterly and annual single-file ZIPs, title dictionaries, annual editions, and viewer tables are delivery/version surfaces of this one Source. The latest checked 2025 files are preliminary under the BLS lifecycle until finalization with the subsequent year’s first-quarter release; files do not emit a row-level release timestamp, seasonal-adjustment field, or immutable revision-vintage identifier. Employment levels represent covered jobs, not unique persons, and published wage/contribution fields must not be relabeled as a generic payroll field.