Every year, with the completion and publication in Wyoming Labor Force T rends of the December LAUS data, many readers assume the annual average data for the calendar year are immediately available. The purpose of this article is to inform the reader of the benchmarking process and then discuss some confusing definitions and concepts of employment statistics. In fact, each month's labor force, employment, unemployment, and unemployment rate statistics are subject to four data revisions.
Current data are preliminary, then revised the following month and published in Trends .
After publication the data is subjected to three benchmarked revisions at later dates. Each year we publish the most recent three benchmarked calendar years. This three year benchmarking supersedes preliminary and revised data previously published in Trends for the same time frame. While there is no doubt that redoing data for the same month four times after initial publication can be confusing to the data user, there is a method to our madness. The nature and collection process of economic data dictates that it is not always available on a timely basis.