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Employment – Average Hours Worked

This indicator reports the mean usual hours worked per week in the past 12 months for workers age 16 to 64 years. Data are reported for the total working population and workers by gender. Data are obtained from the 2019-2023 American Community Survey 5-Year estimates.

Source

Source Description

The American Community Survey (ACS) is a nationwide survey designed to provide communities with reliable and timely social, economic, housing, and demographic data every year. The ACS has an annual sample size of about 3.5 million addresses, with survey information collected nearly every day of the year. Data are pooled across a calendar year to produce estimates for that year. As a result, ACS estimates reflect data that have been collected over a period of time rather than for a single point in time as in the decennial census, which is conducted every 10 years and provides population counts as of April 1. The Census Bureau combines 5 consecutive years of ACS data to produce estimates for geographic areas with fewer than 65,000 residents. These 5-year estimates represent data collected over a period of 60 months. Because the ACS is based on a sample, rather than all housing units and people, ACS estimates have a degree of uncertainty associated with them, called sampling error. In general, the larger the sample, the smaller the level of sampling error. Data users should be careful in drawing conclusions about small differences between two ACS estimates because they may not be statistically different.

Citation: U.S. Census Bureau: UNDERSTANDING AND USING AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY DATA: WHAT ALL DATA USERS NEED TO KNOW (2018).

For more information about this source, including data collection methodology and definitions, refer to the American Community Survey data user’s website.

Methodology

Mean usual hours worked per week in the past 12 months data are acquired from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Data represent estimates for the 5-year period 2019-2023. Mean usual hours worked is the number obtained by dividing the aggregate number of hours worked each week of a particular universe by the number of people in that universe.

This indicator cannot be re-summarized or re-calculated to aggregate county-level report areas, or to user-defined geographic boundaries.

For more information on the data reported in the American Community Survey, please see the complete American Community Survey 2023 Subject Definitions.

Data Breakouts Available

  • Employment by Status
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