Fundamentals of Lightcast Data in the US

Lightcast gathers and integrates economic, labor market, demographic, education, profile, and job posting data from dozens of government and private-sector sources, creating a comprehensive and current dataset that includes both published data and detailed estimates with full United States coverage. Industry, occupation, education, demographic, job postings, and profiles data are available at national, state, metropolitan area, and county levels. ZIP code estimates are available for employment, earnings, job change, and demographics data. Read the complete list of Lightcast data sources.

Frequency and Recency of Lightcast Data

Lightcast’s core LMI data (industry, occupation, education, demographics) is updated with the Lightcast quarterly datarun. Each datarun contains the latest data from each of Lightcast’s sources. The datarun is released early in the quarter (e.g. the Q2 datarun is typically released in April). Read more about release notes for Lightcast’s dataruns. Release notes also contain information on the age of the major sources that go into Lightcast data.

Job postings are scraped, deduplicated, and added to the system every day. For reports based on monthly timeframes, the latest month’s postings are added a few days into the following month (e.g. September postings are available a few days into October).

New profiles and updates from Lightcast’s sources for profiles are incorporated quarterly. Read more about the changelog for profiles data.

Postings and profile data is updated every four weeks to account for improvements in tagging to elements, including occupation, company, industry, skills, and more.

Industry Characteristics