Explore Employment Statistics & Workforce Indicators with LEHD Data on PolicyMap

What is Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD)?

PolicyMap is thrilled to announce the update of the Census’ Longitudinal Employer–Household Dynamics (LEHD) data. LEHD is a groundbreaking program at the Census that partners with states to collect data on employment, wages, and Unemployment Insurance and combines these with federal administrative, Census, and survey data. The result is extremely fine-grained block-level data on where workers live and where workers work. LEHD contains data on worker demographics (age, sex, race, ethnicity, and educational attainment), jobs by earnings, and employment by job sector. Our recent update to the data reflects the 2019 data–the latest year for which the data is available.

LEHD offers data about jobs and data about workers.

We have had employment numbers on PolicyMap for some time, but this information provides data about the workforce in an area. LEHD distinguishes between all jobs and primary jobs, or the job from which the worker garners the largest portion of their income. Counting the number of primary jobs gives you the total number of workers. On PolicyMap you can find the total count of workers in an area, as well as workers by educational attainment, age, race, and ethnicity. Here’s an example that shows, in darkest purple, where the highest concentrations of workers with at least a Bachelor’s degree live.

LEHD has data by location of employment and by place of residence.

On the one hand, LEHD contains information from employers about where workers are employed. On the other hand, it contains information from administrative records and Census data about the employees that live in a certain place. This dual lens provides for some very interesting analyses.

As a simple example, see the maps below. The first shows a map of where workers earning less than $15,000 annually live in and around Philadelphia. The second shows where workers earning less than $15,000 are employed. You’ll see the first map feels highly concentrated, with darker purple shades clustered in parts of North Philadelphia. In contrast, the second map reveals little clustering. The lowest-earning jobs are spread throughout the City.

LEHD data links where workers live and where they work.

In addition to offering information about where workers live and where they work, this dataset connects the two, showing you where workers living in a certain area are traveling for work, and vice versa. As a complement to the LEHD data PolicyMap also provides information about job and worker accessibility by auto travel and transit commutes from the EPA’s Smart Location Database.

PolicyMap offers LEHD at the block group level.

Most data out there about employment is at the county, metro, or state level. LEHD offers data at the block level. This means that you can access neighborhood-scale data on the workforce and jobs. LEHD will tell you how many people in your neighborhood are employed in retail, manufacturing, or education. Likewise, it can tell you how many employment opportunities in these sectors there are in your immediate area.

LEHD is available at many geographies.

Because LEHD data is released at the block level, PolicyMap aggregates the data up to all of our most popular geographies including block group, tract, ZIP code, county, place, metro, and state. This allows visitors to the site much more flexibility than before when using jobs data in our sidebar feature. The data can all be accessed under the Economy Menu in Workforce Characteristics (By Residence) and Workforce Characteristics (By Employment).

LEHD data is available within our mapping platform to view or download, and also available for license via flat file and our API. For more information or questions about accessing this dataset, fill in the form below. A member of our team will follow up with more information shortly.