Telephone Call Center Payrolls

## What this measures

The number of people on the payrolls of U.S. establishments whose main business is telephone call centers (NAICS 56142): inbound customer service and help lines run for other companies, and telemarketing.

## Why it matters

Answering customers' questions by phone is one of the jobs AI assistants are most directly built to do. This is the cleanest public count of the people doing that work as a business of its own, so it is an early place to look for AI replacing jobs.

## How to read it

Thousands of jobs, seasonally adjusted. Detailed industries are published a month later than the headline jobs report, and the latest two months are revised as more survey responses arrive. Compare it with total payrolls to separate an industry trend from the business cycle.

## What it does not say

It covers only companies that run call centers as their business. In-house customer service teams at banks, airlines or retailers are counted in their own industries, and work sent to call centers abroad never appears here. A decline can mean automation, offshoring or lower demand; the number alone cannot say which.

## Source

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics (payroll survey), series CES6056142001, all employees, telephone call centers, seasonally adjusted. Public domain. Palanor reads it from the BLS API.