By Adam Pagnucco.
New preliminary numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for employment, establishments and wages paid are in for local jurisdictions for 2025. This is the first year of information available for the impact of the second Trump administration on the Washington region – a challenge for MoCo and all of our neighbors.
How did we do? And what does that say about our future?
First, some notes on methodology. Data in this series comes from BLS’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) program. The program relies on employer reporting to state unemployment insurance agencies to calculate employment, establishments and wages paid by industry, state and county. The program has a major advantage in its ability to measure jurisdictions all over the country in the exact same way, thereby avoiding the apples and oranges issues that plague many other data sources.
In this series, I will examine seven measures – total employment, federal government employment, private employment, construction employment, establishment count, total wages paid and wages paid per job – for each of the ten largest jurisdictions in the region: the District of Columbia; Frederick, Howard, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in Maryland; and Alexandria City and Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William counties in Virginia.
In most posts, I will use three time periods. First, the most recent year (2025’s increase over 2024). Second, a comparison of 2025 to 2019, the year before the pandemic. Third, the increase from 2007 to 2025. I picked 2007 as a base year because it was the year before the Great Recession. This enables short, medium and long-term comparisons.
Now this data comes with a caveat: it is sourced from employers and applies to their payrolls. It does not measure non-employment income. It also does not measure non-payroll work, such as self-employment. That is a non-trivial omission since MoCo is one of the leaders in the D.C. region in proprietors and proprietor income. Proprietor activity, non-employment income and gross domestic product are measured by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, which also releases data by county albeit with a lag. That data awaits a future analysis.
Another caveat is that these estimates are preliminary and will be revised. In the past, revisions have usually not been substantial and have not reversed long-term trends. Since I often revisit this data, I regularly incorporate revised numbers into my histories.
So how are we doing? We will start finding out in Part Two.