The Bureau of Labor Statistics
Summary
The nation's principal labor-market statistics agency ran on $703.95 million and 2,019 people in FY2025 -- about $2.06 per U.S. resident -- to produce the monthly jobs and inflation numbers that set Social Security COLAs, tax brackets, and state aid formulas.
What is this organization?
What does it do?
Each month, and the Census Bureau jointly survey about 60,000 households⧉ for the Current Population Survey -- the source of the national unemployment rate -- while its payroll program collects data from about 120,000 businesses and government agencies (630,000 worksites)⧉ to produce the monthly jobs count. On prices, it collects about 100,000 commodity and service prices monthly⧉ for the Consumer Price Index and about 52,000 producer-price quotations monthly⧉. Its Local Area Unemployment Statistics program publishes monthly estimates for about 8,300 geographic areas⧉, down to cities of 25,000 people.
What does it cost to run — money and people?
Via the FY2025 full-year continuing resolution, Congress enacted $703.95 million in budget authority⧉ for -- $635.95 million from general revenue plus $68 million transferred from the Unemployment Trust Fund⧉ -- funding 2,019 full-time staff⧉. Against the Census Bureau's 341.8 million U.S. residents⧉ as of July 2025, that is about $2.06 per person. The administration's FY2026 request would cut BLS to $647.95 million and 1,851 FTE⧉, a $56 million, 168-position reduction.
View data as table
| Labor Force Statistics | 317.2 | 526 FTE -- CPS, CES, QCEW, OEWS, LAUS, employment projections |
|---|---|---|
| Prices and Cost of Living | 244.4 | 954 FTE -- CPI, PPI, import/export prices, consumer expenditure survey |
| Compensation and Working Conditions | 92.4 | 328 FTE -- wages, benefits, workplace injury/illness data |
| Executive Direction and Staff Services | 37.7 | 159 FTE -- agency-wide direction, data dissemination, field operations |
| Productivity and Technology | 12.4 | 52 FTE -- productivity trends by industry |
Why is it good for society?
numbers set dollar figures elsewhere in government: the IRS ties tax-bracket and Earned Income Tax Credit threshold changes to the CPI, and Social Security uses the CPI to adjust beneficiary payments⧉ every year. Local Area Unemployment Statistics estimates allocate federal funds across 27 assistance programs in 9 departments⧉ covering job training and welfare aid, and wage data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages underlay $692 billion of federal allocations in FY2021 alone⧉, including the Children's Health Insurance Program. Without an independent count, those formulas would be guessing.
- 's FY2025 revised-enacted budget authority ($703.95M) works out to about $2.06 per U.S. resident, funding 2,019 full-time staff across five budget activities.
- The FY2026 budget request would cut by $56 million and 168 from the FY2025 enacted level -- an 8 percent reduction in both dollars and staff.
Your handles.* If you believe has published information that does not meet its own standards or those of the Department of Labor or , you can file a formal Information Quality Correction Request by mail or email -- and appeal to the Information Quality Review Board if you're dissatisfied with the resolution. To check 's numbers yourself rather than take a headline's word for it, the Public Data API is open for public use and pulls the same series itself publishes (registration is encouraged, not required, for a higher daily query limit).
Sources(2) ▾
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics / U.S. Department of Labor, FY 2026 Congressional Budget Justification -- Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025-05-29) — 's own FY2026 congressional budget justification -- gives the agency's founding statute and mission language (Overview, p.9), FY2025 revised-enacted and FY2026 requested budget authority and by activity (Summary of Changes p.3; Summary Budget Authority and by Activity p.4; Appropriation History p.7; Authorizing Statutes p.6), and workload figures for its major survey programs (Labor Force Statistics pp.13-20; Prices and Cost of Living p.28). dol.gov returns HTTP 403 to automated fetches (Akamai bot management); the capture above is a Wayback snapshot of the live PDF, confirmed byte-identical in content to the file used for this entry's facts. PDF internal metadata (pdfinfo) gives a creation date of 2025-05-29; the document did not appear reachable via Wayback until February 2026. dol.gov · original document
- U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Population Growth Slows Due to Historic Decline in Net International Migration (Vintage 2025 national population estimate) (2026-01-27) — The Census Bureau's own Vintage 2025 national population estimate release, giving the U.S. resident population as of July 1, 2025 -- the per-resident denominator for this entry's cost-per-person KPI, per better_metrics.md's sourced-denominator discipline. Same document already sealed in Artemis (indexed via the good-citizen-gao entry's ingest pass); reused here rather than re-captured. census.gov · original document
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics is the nation's oldest federal statistics office, created by the Act of June 27, 1884⧉, which charged it to "acquire and diffuse among the people of the United States useful information on subjects connected with labor... especially upon its relation to the capital, the hours of labor, social, intellectual, and moral prosperity." A 1913 statute folded the Bureau into the Department of Labor⧉, where it remains the principal federal statistical agency measuring labor market activity, prices, and productivity⧉ in the U.S. economy.