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Covered employment (QCEW) in Alaska
320,096
as of March 2026 · quarterly · total
▲ 0.1% vs prior · ▼ 1.3% vs a year earlier
Series employment_covered.ak.total
History since 2020
Range
Show
Recent values
| Date | Covered employment (QCEW) |
|---|---|
| 2026-03-01 | 320,096 |
| 2026-02-01 | 319,684 |
| 2026-01-01 | 316,000 |
| 2025-12-01 | 317,507 |
| 2025-11-01 | 319,188 |
| 2025-10-01 | 328,800 |
| 2025-09-01 | 343,285 |
| 2025-08-01 | 349,565 |
| 2025-07-01 | 348,955 |
| 2025-06-01 | 350,490 |
| 2025-05-01 | 340,540 |
| 2025-04-01 | 328,539 |
| 2025-03-01 | 324,177 |
| 2025-02-01 | 321,949 |
| 2025-01-01 | 317,533 |
| 2024-12-01 | 318,309 |
| 2024-11-01 | 318,701 |
| 2024-10-01 | 327,236 |
| 2024-09-01 | 342,778 |
| 2024-08-01 | 346,674 |
| 2024-07-01 | 345,528 |
| 2024-06-01 | 347,033 |
| 2024-05-01 | 335,269 |
| 2024-04-01 | 323,478 |
Related series
- Average weekly wageFrom the same employer tax records: total wages divided by covered employment is roughly the average wage, so a jump in one without the others is usually composition — which industries are hiring — rather than raises.
- Total wages
Covered employment (QCEW) elsewhere
- Aleutians East Borough
- Aleutians West Census Area
- Bethel Census Area
- Bristol Bay Borough
- Chugach Census Area
- City and Borough of Juneau
- City and Borough of Sitka
- City and Borough of Wrangell
More about Alaska
About this data
Near-census counts of Alaska jobs and wages straight from unemployment-insurance tax records — the gold standard for borough-level employment and the only reliable wage measure for every borough and industry. Headline series: statewide covered employment (~320k jobs), average weekly wage (~$1,430), and total quarterly payroll (~$6B). Slow (5–6 month lag) but definitive; this is what benchmarks the monthly survey estimates.
Known issues & gotchas
- URL is a template:
https://data.bls.gov/cew/data/api/{year}/{qtr}/area/{area_fips}.csvwith qtr 1–4, e.g..../2024/4/area/02000.csv. Verified live 2026-08-06 with a plain GET — no key, no registration. (This is separate from the BLS timeseries API, which covers QCEW poorly.)qtr=areturns annual averages. - One file per area per quarter: fetch
02000(statewide) plus each borough/census-area FIPS. Alaska FIPS churn is real — Valdez–Cordova (02261) split into Chugach (02063) and Copper River (02066) in 2019 — so drive the area list from a maintained lookup, and don't fail the run when an old FIPS 404s for a new quarter. - Each area file contains all ownership × industry × aggregation-level rows (statewide file is thousands of rows). Filter by
agglvl_code(statewide all-industry total = own_code 0, industry_code "10"; county totals analogous) rather than assuming row order. Keep industry rows for sector series. - Suppressed cells:
disclosure_code = "N"rows carry zeros in the data fields — treat as missing, not zero, especially in small boroughs where whole sectors are suppressed. - A too-early fetch for an unpublished quarter returns 404 (or an empty/HTML respon