SourcesThe data family
economicdata.dev
Free, versioned US regional and international economic data: BLS unemployment and county jobs and wages, BEA county income, Census median household income and World Bank country indicators, in one schema with citable URLs.
What it is
economicdata.dev is a free public-data site for regional and international economic statistics. It republishes data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the Census Bureau and the World Bank as plain files and a simple API, with no key or signup. Like this site, it’s run by Eric Ness.
It doesn’t produce any numbers of its own. Every dataset names its publisher, its license and the exact credit line to use.
What it measures
The site has five datasets.
- Local area unemployment (LAUS). Monthly labor force, employment, unemployment and the unemployment rate from the BLS Local Area Unemployment Statistics program: states from 1976, and counties and metro and micropolitan areas from 1990. The series are not seasonally adjusted, plus the BLS seasonally adjusted series for states and three metros. A
preliminaryflag marks months BLS still calls preliminary. - County employment and wages (QCEW). Quarterly jobs, total wages, average weekly wage and establishment counts from the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, from 2014, for every county, state and the nation. All industries and ownerships are combined.
- County personal income (BEA CAINC1). Annual personal income, population and per capita income for every county, state and the nation from 1969, in current dollars (not adjusted for inflation).
- Median household income (ACS 5-year). Median household income with its 90 percent margin of error, from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey table B19013, one row per release from 2005–2009 on.
- World macro core indicators. Annual GDP, real GDP growth, GDP per capita, consumer price inflation, unemployment (an ILO modeled estimate) and population for every economy from 1960, from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators. Regional and income-group aggregates are left out.
The site checks LAUS, QCEW and the World Bank data daily, and the BEA and Census data weekly.
What the site adds: one schema and one place-ID scheme across all its sister sites (lowercase ISO codes for countries, us-ca for states, us-county- plus the FIPS code for counties), files in JSON, CSV and Parquet, a version for every update, and checks before each one is published. It also keeps footnotes the source attaches, such as BLS’s preliminary and not-collected codes.
What it misses
County unemployment is modeled, not counted. BLS describes LAUS as a set of non-survey methods. County figures are built from payroll data, unemployment insurance claims and population shares, then adjusted to sum to state model totals. Each January BLS revises up to five years of past data, so a number you pulled last year may have changed.
A month is missing. BLS did not collect the Current Population Survey, the household survey LAUS draws on, for October 2025, during the federal shutdown, and did not collect it afterward. On this site October 2025 is null with footnote X for the states, DC and their substate areas, never filled in.
QCEW counts covered jobs, not all work. BLS says QCEW covers more than 95 percent of US jobs, but it leaves out proprietors, the unincorporated self-employed, unpaid family workers, some farm and domestic workers, and members of the armed forces. It also counts jobs where they are located, while LAUS counts people where they live, so the two won’t match for a commuter county.
Dollars don’t always compare. BEA income is in current dollars. Each ACS release is in its own final year’s dollars, and the site warns that overlapping 5-year periods should not be compared year to year.
Country data is only as good as its sources. The World Bank compiles these indicators from national statistical offices, central banks, the IMF, the ILO and the UN, so quality and timeliness vary by country.
It’s a copy, with its own window. QCEW starts in 2014 here and the ACS in 2005–2009. For anything high-stakes you should check the figure against the agency’s own release.
How to access it
1Browse the datasets
Start at economicdata.dev/datasets/. Each dataset page shows its coverage, schema, license, credit line and every endpoint, with a chart or preview.
2Download the whole dataset
Each dataset is available as one CSV or Parquet file, at /v1/{dataset}/download/{dataset}.csv (or .parquet). Parquet keeps column types and is much smaller.
3Call the API
The base URL is https://api.economicdata.dev/v1. The catalog at /v1/catalog lists every dataset with its current version and coverage. Each series for each place is its own small file, at /v1/{dataset}/{series}/{location}.json (or .csv), and /v1/{dataset}/locations lists the series and place IDs.
For example, https://api.economicdata.dev/v1/laus/nsa/us-county-06037.json returns monthly LAUS figures for Los Angeles County. Tested on 2026-11-14, it returned months from 1990-01 to 2026-09. October 2025 came back null with footnote X, and September 2026 was flagged preliminary.
4Read the docs
The docs cover the URL scheme, place IDs, formats, versions, caching and errors. The API reference lists the exact URLs for each dataset. Without a key you can make 120 requests a minute; for large pulls, download the bulk file instead.
How to cite it
Cite the version you used, and credit the agency with the exact text the site gives on each dataset page and on its sources page. For LAUS that’s “Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Local Area Unemployment Statistics,” with the program’s URL.
Every update gets a version ID: the publish date plus the start of a hash, such as 2026-10-26.1d9b973c73. Put it after the dataset ID with @ to pin it: a pinned URL always returns the same data. The site says to cite the monthly snapshots, the first version of each month, because those are kept permanently. Other versions may be removed after 30 days. /v1/{dataset}/versions lists them.
A worked example, for Los Angeles County unemployment in the October 2026 snapshot:
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Local Area Unemployment Statistics, Los Angeles County, CA, not seasonally adjusted. Retrieved via economicdata.dev, laus version 2026-10-26.1d9b973c73, https://api.economicdata.dev/v1/laus@2026-10-26.1d9b973c73/nsa/us-county-06037.json, accessed 14 November 2026.
Sources & further reading
- economicdata.dev, its docs and its sources and licenses
- BLS, Local Area Unemployment Statistics and its estimation methodology
- BLS, effect of the 2025 federal government shutdown on the Current Population Survey
- BLS, QCEW overview
- BEA, personal income by county
- Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year data (API)
- World Bank, World Development Indicators
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