Technical Note
Data in this release are from the National Compensation Survey (NCS), conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor,
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This release contains March 2009 data on civilian, private industry, and State and
local government workers in the United States. Under the NCS program, information on the incidence and provision of
benefits is published in several stages. This news release provides data on the incidence of (access to and participation
in) selected benefits and the share of premiums paid by employers and employees for medical care. An extensive number
of tables on the incidence of selected benefits will be available in the annual bulletin to be published in late
summer, 2009. Data on detailed provisions of health insurance and retirement benefits in private industry for 2009
will be available in 2010. Previous publications containing information on employee benefits for private industry and
State and local government workers are available on the BLS website http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs.
Calculation details
Averages for occupations within an establishment were used to produce estimates for worker groups averaging hourly
pay within the six earnings percentiles: Lowest 10 percent, lowest 25 percent, second 25 percent, third 25 percent,
highest 25 percent, and highest 10 percent. The percentiles are computed using earnings reported for individual workers
in sampled establishment jobs and their scheduled hours of work. Establishments in the survey may report only individual
worker earnings for each sampled job. For the calculation of percentile estimates, the individual worker hourly earnings
are appropriately weighted and then arrayed from lowest to highest.
The published 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles designate position in the earnings distribution within
each published occupation. At the 50th percentile, the median, half of the hours are paid the same as or more than the
rate shown in the data tables, and half are paid the same as or less than the rate shown. At the 25th percentile, one-fourth
of the hours are paid the same as or less than the rate shown. At the 75th percentile, one-fourth are paid the same as or
more than the rate shown. The 10th and 90th percentiles follow the same logic. The percentile values are based on wages
to be published in the bulletin National Compensation Survey: Occupational Earnings in the United States, 2008. Values
corresponding to the percentiles used in the tables are as follows:
Characteristics Hourly wage percentiles
10 25 50 (median) 75 90
Civilian workers $8.24 $11.00 $16.25 $25.48 $37.86
Private industry workers $8.00 $10.50 $15.50 $24.22 $36.43
State and local government workers $11.35 $14.98 $21.43 $31.55 $43.23
The tables on employer and employee medical premiums (tables 3 and 4) include participants in all medical plans,
with calculations for both single and family coverage. The calculations are not based on actual decisions regarding
medical coverage made by employees within the occupations. Rather, the premium calculations are based on the assumption
that all employees in the occupation have identical coverage.
Take-up rates
Take-up rates are the percentage of workers with access to a plan who participate in the plan. They are computed by
using the number of workers participating in a plan divided by the number of workers with access to the plan, multiplied
by 100, and rounded to the nearest one percent. Since the computation of take-up rates is based on the number of workers
collected rather than rounded percentage estimates, the take-up rates in the tables may not equal the ratio of participation
to access estimates.
Leave benefits for teachers
Primary, secondary, and special education teachers typically have a work schedule of 37 or 38 weeks per year. Because
of this work schedule, they are generally not offered vacation or holidays. In many cases, the time off during winter and
spring breaks during the school year is not considered vacation days for the purposes of this survey.
Survey scope
The March 2009 NCS benefits survey represented about 122 million civilian workers; of this number, about 102 million
were private industry workers and 19 million, State and local government workers (see Appendix table 2). For purposes of
this study, a private establishment is an economic unit that produces goods or services, a central administrative office,
or an auxiliary unit providing support services to a company. For private industries, the establishment is usually at
a single physical location. For State and local governments, an establishment is defined as an agency or entity such as
a school district, college, university, hospital, nursing home, administrative body, court, police department, fire
department, health or social service operation, highway maintenance operation, urban transit operation, or other
governmental unit. It provides services under the authority of a specific State or local government organization within
a defined geographic area or jurisdiction. The survey sample weights were adjusted to reflect the March 2009 employment
figures from the Current Employment Statistics survey.
The nine census divisions are defined as follows: New England--Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire,
Rhode Island, and Vermont; Middle Atlantic--New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania; East North Central--Illinois, Indiana,
Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin; West North Central--Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South
Dakota; South Atlantic--Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia,
and West Virginia; East South Central--Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee; West South Central--Arkansas,
Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas; Mountain--Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming; and
Pacific--Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington.
Sample design and data collection
The sample for this survey was selected by using a 3-stage design. The first stage involved the selection of areas.
The NCS State and local government sample consists of 152 areas that represent the Nation’s 361 metropolitan statistical
areas and 573 micropolitan statistical areas, as defined by the Office of Management and Budget in December 2003, and
the remaining portions of the 50 States. The private industry sample has begun the transition to the December 2003
definition with replacement of one-fifth of the sample under the new area definitions; the private industry sample currently
consists of 227 areas.
In the second stage, the sample of establishments was drawn by first stratifying the sampling frame by industry and
implicitly by establishment size. The list of establishments from which the survey sample was selected was developed
from State unemployment insurance reports and is based on the 2007 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).
The third stage of sample selection was the drawing of a probability sample of occupations within a sampled
establishment. Identification of the occupations for which data were to be collected was a 4-step process:
1. Probability-proportional-to-size selection of establishment jobs
2. Classification of jobs into occupations based on the 2000 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC)
system
3. Characterization of jobs as full time vs. part time, union vs. nonunion, and time versus incentive
4. Determination of the level of work of each job
For additional technical information, see the BLS Handbook of Methods, available online at
http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/home.htm.
Definition of terms
Civilian workers. Private industry and State and local government workers.
Full-time worker. Any employee whom the employer considers to be full time.
Part-time worker. Any employee whom the employer considers to be part time.
Nonunion worker. An employee in an occupation not meeting the conditions for union coverage.
Union worker. Any employee is in a union occupation when all of the following conditions are met:
* A labor organization is recognized as the bargaining agent for all workers in the occupation.
* Wage and salary rates are determined through collective bargaining or negotiations.
* Settlement terms, which must include earnings provisions and may include benefit provisions, are
embodied in a signed, mutually binding collective bargaining agreement
Survey estimation methods
The survey uses an estimator that assigns the inverse of each sample unit’s probability of selection as a weight
to the unit’s data at each stage of sample selection and four weight adjustment factors. The first factor adjusts for
establishment nonresponse and the second factor adjusts for occupational nonresponse. The third factor adjusts for any
special situations that may have occurred during data collection. The fourth factor, poststratification, also called
benchmarking, is introduced to adjust the estimated employment totals to actual counts of employment by industry for
the survey reference date.
For additional technical information, see the BLS Handbook of Methods, available online at
http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/home.htm.
Reliability of estimates
The statistics in this summary are estimates derived from a sample of usable occupation quotes selected from the
responding establishments. They are not tabulations based on data from all employees in establishments within the scope
of the survey. Consequently, the data are subject to sampling and nonsampling errors.
Sampling errors are the differences that can arise between results derived from a sample and those computed from
observations of all units in the population being studied. The sample used for this survey is one of a number of possible
samples of the same size that could have been selected using the sample design. Estimates derived from the different samples
would differ from one another.
A measure of the variation among these differing estimates is the standard error. It can be used to measure the precision
with which an estimate from a particular sample approximates the expected result of all possible samples. The chances are
about 68 out of 100 that an estimate from the survey differs from a complete population figure by less than the standard
error. The chances are about 90 out of 100 that this difference would be less than 1.6 times the standard error. The
statements of comparison appearing in this publication are significant at a 1.6 standard error level or better. This means
that for differences cited, the estimated difference is greater than 1.6 times the standard error of the difference.
Standard errors can be used to evaluate published series. To assist users in ascertaining the reliability of series, the
standard errors for all estimates are available on the BLS Web site http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs.
Nonsampling errors also affect survey results. They can be attributed to many sources, such as the inability to obtain
information for some establishments, difficulties with survey definitions, inability of the respondents to provide correct
information; or mistakes in recording or coding the data obtained. Although they were not specifically measured, the
nonsampling errors were expected to be minimal due to the extensive training of the field economists who gathered the survey
data, computer edits of the data, and detailed data review.
Survey response
The March 2009 benefits survey included a sample of 18,287 establishments. The definitions in Appendix table 1 are as follows:
Responding. The establishment provided information on at least one usable occupation. An occupation is classified as usable
if the following data are present: occupational characteristics (full- vs. part-time schedule, union vs. nonunion status, and
time vs. incentive pay type), work schedule, and wage data.
Refused or unable to provide data. The establishment did not provide earnings, occupational classification, worker characteristics,
and work schedule data for any occupation.
Out of business or not in survey scope. The establishment is no longer in operation, following a bankruptcy, for example.
Establishments not in the survey scope include farm and private households, the self-employed, the Federal government, and
locations of an establishment out of the sampled area. Also excluded are establishments with no workers within the survey
scope (if all employees are also owners, for example).
Obtaining information
For research articles on employee benefits, see the Monthly Labor Review or Compensation and Working Conditions Online at
the BLS Web sites http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/home.htm and http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/home.htm. For more detailed information
on the NAICS and SOC classification systems, including background information, see the BLS Web sites
http://www.bls.gov/bls/naics.htm and http://www.bls.gov/soc/home.htm.
Additional information about the NCS may be obtained by calling (202) 691–6199. You may also write to the U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics, Division of Compensation Data Analysis and Planning, 2 Massachusetts Ave., NE, Room 4175, Washington, D.C.
20212–0001, or send e-mail to NCSinfo@bls.gov. The data contained in this summary are also available on the BLS Internet
site: http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs. Users may access benefits data from previous surveys through a variety of tools available
on the same page. Material in this summary is in the public domain and, with appropriate credit, may be reproduced without
permission. This information will be made available to sensory-impaired individuals upon request. Voice telephone:
(202) 691–5200; Federal Relay Service: 1–800–877–8339.
