Methodology & sources
Everything here is built from public data on data.ny.gov. Data last refreshed Jun 2026.
Datasets
- Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS), Seasonally Adjusted: Beginning 1976 (dh9m-5v4d)
- Local Area Unemployment Statistics: Beginning 1976 (5hyu-bdh8)
- Current Employment Statistics: Beginning 1990 (6k74-dgkb)
- Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (gkgz-nw24)
- Long Term Occupational Projections (pqm4-9qqb)
- Long-term Industry Projections (b7d6-zygf)
- Unemployment Insurance Beneficiaries and Benefit Amounts Paid (xbjp-8sra)
How we compute things
Regional figures.New York's 10 labor-market regions don't all appear as a single tidy level in the source data, so we aggregate county-level figures using NYSDOL's standard 10-region county definition. Regional unemployment is therefore not seasonally adjustedand may differ slightly from NYSDOL's own published regional numbers.
“Opportunity job.” We flag an occupation as an opportunity job when its statewide median wage is at or above the all-occupations median andit is projected to grow through 2032. (NYSDOL's own “Opportunity Occupations” tool adds an education filter; ours is a simpler, transparent rule.)
Projections are totals, not annual. Every projected change we show (for occupations and industries) is the total percent change over the projection period (2022–2032), not an annualized rate.
“Higher-paying next step.” The career-ladder suggestions are occupations in the same broad SOC field that pay more — a transparent “same field, higher pay” heuristic, not an O*NET skills-similarity score.
Job postings are not shown. Live openings come from the National Labor Exchange / NY Job Bank, which requires a data-use agreement and cannot be redisplayed in a public app. We link out to the Job Bank instead.
Refresh cadence
| Measure | Updates | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Unemployment (LAUS) | Monthly | data.ny.gov (NYSDOL/BLS) |
| Jobs (CES) | Monthly | data.ny.gov (NYSDOL/BLS) |
| UI claims | Weekly / monthly | data.ny.gov (NYSDOL) |
| Wages (OEWS) | Annual (+ cost-of-living updates) | data.ny.gov (NYSDOL/BLS) |
| Projections | Every 2 years | data.ny.gov (NYSDOL) |
Attribution: New York State Department of Labor and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, published via data.ny.gov. BLS data is public domain (attribution requested). Independent Concourse showcase; not affiliated with NYSDOL.