Employed Men, Household Survey (U.S.)

## What this measures

The number of men aged 16 and over who did any paid work in the survey week (or were temporarily absent from a job), from the Current Population Survey of about 60,000 households. Thousands, seasonally adjusted, monthly since January 1948.

## Why it matters

It is the household-survey counterpart of the payroll count: it counts people rather than jobs and includes the self-employed and farm workers. Comparing the two shows whether a move in payrolls is broad.

## How to read it

The household survey was not collected for October 2025 (the 2025 lapse in appropriations), so that month has no reading; charts break the line there rather than join September to November. Each January the household survey adopts new population controls, which can move the level by hundreds of thousands in one month; BLS does not revise earlier months, so a January step is partly a change in the population estimate, not in jobs.

## What it does not say

The sample is far smaller than the payroll survey, so monthly changes under about 600,000 for all workers are within sampling error. Someone with two jobs counts once.

## Source

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Level - Men (LNS12000001), via FRED. Public domain.