Read the labor market in layers.
Employment scale, wage distribution, occupational concentration, and legal protections answer different questions. This hub keeps the layers connected without treating them as interchangeable.
The BLS OEWS May 2025 release estimates 155,495,730 wage-and-salary jobs across occupations nationally. LaborBrief organizes 300 high-employment detailed occupations and all major groups, then publishes state comparisons only when every required BLS value is present.
Begin with the occupation index to compare national employment, mean annual wage, and median annual wage. A profile adds hourly mean and percentile estimates. The wage analysis hub reorders the same release by one explicit measure at a time, showing why a ranking changes when the question changes.
Use the state index when geography matters. State pages connect BLS employment and wage context with the DOL wage table updated July 1, 2026, unemployment provisions effective January 2026, and the state labor department. Those dates remain separate because a survey reference period is not a legal effective date.
Location quotient compares an occupation’s share of state employment with its national share. It is a concentration measure, not job growth or vacancy demand. Employment is an estimated count, not a live opening total. Mean and median describe a distribution, not a guaranteed offer. The glossary and methods library keep those definitions beside the data.
Worker-rights research begins in the labor-laws hub. Each topic identifies a federal baseline, explains where state law can differ, and links to primary sources. Pages are general information, not legal advice, and unverified state-specific fields remain “not available.”
The verification method documents thresholds and suppression handling; Sources lists public publications; About explains the independent publisher; and Contact accepts corrections tied to a page, primary-source URL, and effective date.
Primary sources
- BLS OEWS tables — BLS OEWS, May 2025
- DOL worker resources — federal rights entry point
LaborBrief treats U.S. labor market as a source-navigation page, not a substitute for the underlying publication. Dates, definitions, coverage, suppressed values, and exceptions remain attached to the source that produced them. Readers should preserve those details when quoting or comparing the page.