SEPT. 26, 2022 — The U.S. Census Bureau today released its first-ever Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) for Puerto Rico. These data, available through QWI Explorer and the Local Employment Dynamics (LED) Extraction Tool, provide comprehensive data access and analytical capabilities through flexible charts, tables and maps.

Labor market data in the QWI are available by worker age, sex and race/ethnicity. Wages by industry and demographics as well as by whether workers were newly hired are also available.

Highlights:

• In recent years, Puerto Rico’s overall workforce by sex has been nearly evenly split between male (51%) and female (49%). The QWIs permit further analysis by industry and geographic granularity. For example, Morovis municipio showed an overall average split of 46% male and 54% female.
• Over the past four quarters of available data, Separations (job with a given employer ended) were most common among the 25-34 age group with an average of 30% of all Separations. Separations by firm size show the largest percentage of employers with 500+ employees with an average of 43% of total Separations; employers with 0-19 employees had the second highest percentage at 21%.
• The largest volume of Replacement Hires (hires into employment replacing those who left the employer) in the first quarter of 2021 occurred in Administrative and Support and Waste Management and Remediation Services (8,916), followed by Retail Trade (7,208).
• Average Monthly Earnings of Full Quarter Employment were generally greater at firms of greater age, e.g., in the past four quarters of available data (2020Q2-2021Q1), average earnings at firms over 10 years old were between 25% and 38% greater than the average earnings at firms under two years old.

Puerto Rico is the latest partner to join the Local Employment Dynamics (LED) Partnership. LED is a voluntary partnership between the Census Bureau and U.S. states and territories. LED partners share unemployment insurance wage records earnings data and the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) with the Census Bureau. The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program combines LED partner administrative data, additional administrative data and data from censuses and surveys. From these data, the program creates statistics on employment, earnings and job flows at detailed levels of geography and industry and for different worker demographic groups.

LEHD is an integral part of the U.S. Department of Commerce Open Government Plan to unlock public access to high-value government data.

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