(Restricted) National Compensation Survey, All Benefits Quarterly (ABQ)

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The National Compensation Survey is a quarterly survey of establishments collecting information on pay and benefits provided to employees. The survey data support published estimates for the Employment Cost Index (ECI) and Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC) series. The NCS All Benefits Quarterly (ABQ) files are constructed from the survey data and contain hourly employer costs for wages and 18 select employer-provided benefits that include paid leave, life and health insurance, retirement, and legally required. The unit of observation of the survey is a job within a sampled establishment. A job includes one or more workers with the same job title and duties, and other matching job characteristics (full-time/part-time status, union/nonunion status, and whether or not the job has an incentive pay provision). At each sampled establishment, 1 to 8 jobs are subsampled (based on employment size), with sampling proportionate to the number of job incumbents at the time of sample initiation. Those sampled jobs are followed longitudinally each quarter. Because of within-job turnover, however, the incumbents of a job may change from one quarter to the next. The NCS scope includes establishments with one or more workers in private industry and in state and local government in the 50 States and the District of Columbia. The survey excludes workers in federal and quasi-federal agencies, military personnel, agricultural workers, private households workers, the self-employed, volunteers, unpaid workers, individuals receiving long-term disability compensation, and those working overseas. The NCS also excludes individuals who set their own pay and family members paid token wages. The NCS uses a rotating panel design where a sampling panel of establishments rotate out and are replaced by a new panel. One-third of the private industry establishments typically rotate out of the sample each year. The state and local government units consists of one panel, and is replaced about every 10 years. The current sample size is approximately 8,000 establishments yielding about 36,000 job records. All wage and benefit costs on the ABQ files are average hourly costs computed across the incumbent workers in the job for the period of study. The files also contain information on the establishment's employment total, the industry classification (6-digit NAICS), geographic location, and the job's characteristics including the occupational classification (6-digit SOC). The NCS does not collect information on the demographics of job incumbents such as gender, age, or education level, and thus such fields are not on the ABQ files. An overview of the survey can be found in the BLS Handbook of Methods at: https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/ncs/home.htm