Decompose output per hour, hours, compensation, and unit labor costs across six BLS major sectors.
BLS long-run production accounts
Labor Share & Productivity Observatory
Track labor's share of output alongside productivity and real hourly compensation from 1947 onward. These accounting measures do not directly measure profits, bargaining power, or antitrust markets.
- Panel
- 9 x 318
- series x quarterly slots
- Coverage
- Q1 1947 - Q2 2026
- 80 calendar years
- Observed
- 2,859
- 3 explicit source gaps
- Release state
- 6 preliminary
- 9 revised cells
- Labor share
- 93.5
- -3.3% over 4Q / prelim.
- Labor productivity
- 120.0
- index, 2017=100 / prelim.
- Real compensation
- 109.2
- index, 2017=100 / prelim.
- Compensation-productivity gap
- -10.8
- index points, not percentage points
Accounting passport
Worker share and output per hour
United States / quarterly / seasonally adjusted / 2017=100Analytical view
Labor-share indexes across aggregate scopes
Q1 1947 to Q2 2026 / 318 quarterly slots- Scopes
- 3
- broad production aggregates
- Visible quarters
- 318
- Q1 1947 - Q2 2026
- Published cells
- 2,862
- three indexes per scope-quarter
- Release states
- 6
- 3 gaps / 9 revised
Q1 1947Q2 2026
Nonfarm businessscope Nonfarm businessBusinessscope BusinessNonfinancial corporatescope Nonfinancial corporations
1 selected scope-quarter relationship row is incomplete in this release.
Context routes
From a national account to an antitrust question
Place aggregate compensation accounts beside payroll jobs, hours, and average hourly earnings.
Read vacancies, hires, quits, and separations as labor-market flow context, not employer power by themselves.
Carry descriptive signals into testable research questions with explicit evidence and inference boundaries.
Accounting relationship, not a competition verdictLabor share, labor productivity, and real hourly compensation describe broad national production and compensation accounts. They do not measure corporate profits, markups, market concentration, employer power, bargaining power, a legal antitrust market, distribution within the worker population, or the competitive cause of a change.Read interpretation standard
Interpretation standard
Three indexes, one reference, different meanings
Labor share
The compensation of workers relative to current-dollar output, published here as a 2017=100 index. The index level is not the percentage of output paid to labor.
Labor productivity
Real output per hour worked. Aggregate movement can combine within-sector changes with shifts in economic composition.
Real hourly compensation
Hourly labor compensation deflated by a consumer-price measure. Its price concept differs from the output deflator embedded in labor share.
Derived index gap
Real compensation index minus productivity index. It is a transparent reference difference in index points, not a percentage-point labor share, profit share, or causal estimate.