Available now
US jobs by census block, and commuting flows by tract and county
Census LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics, release 8.4: jobs by the block where people work and the block where they live, home-to-work flows by tract and county, and a block crosswalk. 10 tables, 69,756,683 rows.
Coverage: Jobs by workplace block for 2021 to 2023, with 146,579,814 jobs in 2023. Jobs by home block for 2023. 38,737,647 tract-to-tract flows for 2023 and 10,768,631 county-to-county flows for 2010 to 2023. All 8,180,866 2020 census blocks in the crosswalk. All Jobs (JT00) only. LODES has no workplace data for Alaska from 2017, Michigan from 2022 or Puerto Rico.
Why pay for public data
LODES ships as separate files for every state and year, and the block-to-block commuting files run over 100 million rows a year. This package sums them exactly to tract and county pairs, checks every file against the Census checksums, checks that the flow totals agree with the block tables, and keys everything on zero-padded GEOIDs that match current ACS tables.
How it is built
- 1
Pull the LODES 8.4 workplace, residence and origin-destination files for every state, and the LODES block crosswalk, from the Census LEHD site: 1,611 data files.
- 2
Verify every file against its Census SHA-256 checksum, sum the block-level commuting rows exactly to tract pairs for 2023 and county pairs for 2010 to 2023, and check that the flow tables agree with the block tables.
- 3
Keep job counts as published, in current LODES geography, and add the 2020 codes to the crosswalk. Rebuilt annually when the Census Bureau adds a year.
What is in each record
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| BLOCK_GEOID, BLOCK_GROUP_GEOID, TRACT_GEOID, COUNTY_FIPS, STATE_FIPS | Zero-padded text. BLOCK_GEOID is 15 digits |
| YEAR, JOB_TYPE, C000 | Total jobs. JOB_TYPE is JT00 |
| CA01 to CA03, CE01 to CE03 | Jobs by worker age band and monthly earnings band |
| CNS01 to CNS20 | Jobs in each of the 20 NAICS sectors |
| CR01 to CR05, CR07, CT01, CT02, CD01 to CD04, CS01, CS02 | Jobs by race, ethnicity, education and sex |
| WAC_BLOCK, RAC_BLOCK | 6,687,318 workplace block-years for 2021 to 2023, and 5,379,188 home blocks for 2023 |
| W_TRACT_GEOID, H_TRACT_GEOID, S000, SE01, SE02, SE03 | OD_TRACT: 2023 flows with total jobs and three earnings bands |
| W_COUNTY_FIPS, H_COUNTY_FIPS, SA01 to SA03, SI01 to SI03 | OD_COUNTY: 2010 to 2023 flows with age, earnings and industry group segments |
| CBSA_CODE, ZCTA, PLACE_GEOID, CD119_GEOID, SCHOOL_DISTRICT_GEOID, BLOCK_LAT, BLOCK_LON | BLOCK_XWALK: every block with its metro area, ZIP area, place, 119th Congress district, school district and internal point |
| STATE_COVERAGE, LODES_VARIABLE, JOB_TYPE, SOURCE_FILE, DATA_DICTIONARY | Which states have data in which year, every variable defined, every Census file with its checksum, and 211 column definitions |
Who uses it
- Site selection, retail and trade-area analysts
- Transportation and regional planners
- Economic development and labor market researchers
Pricing
$799 a year, including each annual refresh.
No personal contact data is collected or sold in any QuestionPunk dataset.
Questions
- Is this data not free from the government?
- Yes. The source files are public and we link to them. You pay for the cleaning, the joins, the documented schema and the refresh, not for the data itself.
- How is it delivered?
- As Parquet or CSV files, by download link or to your own cloud bucket. The same tables load into Snowflake with the scripts we include.
- Can I see the data before paying?
- Yes. Ask for a sample and we send the Vermont rows from every table, plus the full data dictionary.
- Are block-level counts exact?
- No. LODES is noise-infused, partially synthetic data: the Census Bureau adds noise to workplace counts, and home locations are synthetic. Sum blocks and tract pairs to larger areas before drawing conclusions.
- Does it count people or jobs?
- Jobs. A worker with two jobs counts twice. Jobs are counted in the second quarter of each year and include Federal jobs.
- What is not included?
- Block-to-block commuting rows, which run over 100 million rows a year, are summed exactly to tract pairs for 2023 and county pairs for 2010 to 2023 instead. Also left out: block-level data for earlier years, job types other than All Jobs, and firm age and size.
- Does it include personal data?
- No. Every row is a count of jobs for an area or a pair of areas. No person, employer or address is named.
- What is the license?
- LODES is US Census Bureau data in the public domain. These tables are processed by QuestionPunk and are not Census Bureau data as published. The Census Bureau does not endorse this product.
Tell us what you need
Geography, size and fields. A two-line email is enough, and a person replies.
Request a sampleMore from the catalog
- University syllabi
- ZIP code demographics
- Census tract demographics
- ZIP code crosswalk
- US care facilities
- CDC PLACES health estimates
- Medicare spending
- US college data
- US salaries by occupation
- US housing cost and rent benchmarks
- FDA drug reference data
- US K-12 schools and districts
- IRS income and migration data
- US medical code sets
- Bank and credit union branches
- US health shortage areas
- CMS cost reports
- ACA marketplace plans
- FDA Total Diet Study
- US air quality
- FDA medical device data
- CMS Provider of Services and CLIA labs