Announcement
With the enactment of the 2011 Federal budget, the Locality Pay Survey (LPS) portion of the National Compensation Survey (NCS) was eliminated. Occupational data by locality will still be available through the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) program.
To continue to meet the requirement of the Federal Pay Comparability Act of 1990, data from the OES and NCS programs will be used collaboratively. OES will provide waged data by occupations for all localities nationwide with the NCS providing detailed worker characteristics such as work levels, union status, and part time or full time work schedules. For the history of how BLS occupational wage surveys were used for federal pay comparability, see http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2009/09/art3full.pdf
For information on historical NCS publications, see the archives links below.
May 25, 2011
Average pay for workers in the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA metropolitan area was 20 percent
above the national average in 2010. In Brownsville-Harlingen, TX, workers earned an average of 80
cents for every dollar earned by workers nationwide.
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Current OCS News Releases
Archived OCS News Releases
Databases
Beginning with the NCS wage bulletins published in September 2006, occupations were classified using the 2000 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) and industries the 2002 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The Create Customized Table applications are currently being developed to access the SOC data. Currently, only select wage data from the most recent years (with references dates of December 2006 and later) of NCS national, census region and local areas are available through the multi-screen data search query system. Data from bulletins can be obtained at http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/compub.htm. See the Special Notice below for more information.
More Tools
- Series Report —Already know the series identifier for the statistic you want? Use this shortcut to retrieve your data.
- Flat files FTP Site —For those who want it all. Download a flat file of the entire database or large subset of the database.
- Wages Search--allows you to search through all National Compensation Survey - Occupational Wage publications and tables that are currently available electronically.
Status of Locality Pay Surveys (LPS)
With the enactment of the Federal Government's 2011 budget, the Locality Pay Survey (LPS) portion of the National Compensation Survey (NCS) was eliminated. The final set of LPS products are now published which include the National Bulletin, Nine Census Summaries, Occupational Pay Relatives, and the LPS locality wage estimates. These products will not be produced in the future but we would like to develop methodologies, resources permitting, so that similar estimates can be modeled in the future.
To meet the locality pay requirements of the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act of 1990, data from the BLS Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) and NCS programs will be used. The OES program provides wage data by occupation for all localities nationwide. The Employment Cost Index (ECI) program will continue to provide detailed worker characteristics such as work level, union status, and part- or full-time work schedule. Together, these two programs allow the BLS to develop wage data by worker characteristics for many occupations and localities.
Although LPS estimates will no longer be available, all other National Compensation Survey product lines, including the Employment Cost Index (ECI) (see Employment Cost Trends) and NCS Benefits, will continue to be produced. Occupational wage estimates will be still available from the OES program.
Historical Data
News Release
