A Colorado-level view of labor demand, built from two federal statistical programs. The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) tells us where the jobs are by industry. The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey tells us what people earn by occupation.
QCEW panel covers 2020 through 2024 annual averages. OEWS values are for May 2024 (published April 2025). Both reflect wage-and-salary work covered by unemployment insurance and by the OEWS establishment survey; self-employment and informal work are not included. Full methodology and raw sources are documented in the research folder.
Each federal program answers only part of the labor-demand question on its own. QCEW is effectively a census of jobs covered by state unemployment-insurance (UI) programs, so it answers where jobs are with industry-by-industry employment counts. OEWS is an establishment survey that samples occupations, so it answers what people earn with annual wage distributions.
Jobs and wages by NAICS sector, measured as an annual average. Near-census of UI-covered employment. Location quotients show where Colorado has a larger share of jobs than the nation does.
Wage distributions by occupation (SOC 2018) from a survey of about 1.1 million establishments nationally. Medians, 25th, and 75th percentiles are the stable reference points; means can be skewed by top earners.
Percent change in annual-average employment between 2020 and 2024. Sectors are ranked from fastest growth at the top to largest decline at the bottom. Absolute jobs added or lost are shown alongside.
| Sector | Employment 2024 | Change since 2020 | Avg annual wage | LQ |
|---|
Statewide, all industries combined. Wage bars show the P25 to P75 range with a dark tick at the median. Search the table or filter by SOC major group. Location quotients above 1.0 mean Colorado employs a larger share of workers in this occupation than the nation does on average.
| Occupation | Employment | Wage (P25 · median · P75) | Median | LQ |
|---|
Every figure on this page is regenerated from scripts under research/labor_demand/ in the project repository. Raw files are downloaded fresh from BLS, paired with .meta.json sidecars recording the exact URL, HTTP status, fetch timestamp, and byte count, and processed into the CSVs that this page embeds.
BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, Colorado statewide (area_fips = 08000), annual averages 2020 through 2024. The panel pulls NAICS 2-digit sectors at aggregation level 54 (by ownership) and the state total at aggregation level 50. Sector cells flagged with disclosure_code = N are excluded before summing.
QCEW is a near-census of UI-covered employment. It excludes most self-employment, unpaid family workers, and a handful of agricultural and domestic categories. Suppression under differential-privacy rules has tightened in recent release years: more ownership-by-sector cells are undisclosed in 2024 than in prior years, which is visible in the trend chart where a few sectors drop briefly.
BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2024 state file (oesm24st.zip, published April 2025). Rows restricted to AREA = 08 (Colorado), AREA_TYPE = 2 (state), and I_GROUP = cross-industry. Wage percentiles are as published; the ** top-code indicates wages at or above $239,200 per year and is shown as a capped marker where it appears.
OEWS is a survey, not a census, so each estimate carries a percent relative standard error (EMP_PRSE for employment, MEAN_PRSE for the mean wage). Suppressed cells (published as #) are omitted.
The OEWS state file reports occupational employment and wages only at the cross-industry level for a state. Sector-by-occupation detail at the state level requires either the OEWS National Industry-Specific file combined with national staffing-pattern shares applied to Colorado QCEW sector employment, or a state-specific source such as the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment's Labor Market Information (LMI) division. Both are scoped as a separate build and are not included here; see the research folder README for details.
If this panel informs downstream work, cite the underlying federal sources: