In the figures based on payroll reports, persons on leave paid for by the company are included, but those on leave without pay for the entire payroll period are not. The household survey measures hours worked for all workers, whereas the payroll survey measures hours for private production and nonsupervisory workers paid for by employers. In the household survey, all persons with a job but not at work are excluded from the hours distribution and the computations of average hours at work. In the payroll survey, production or nonsupervisory employees on paid vacation, paid holiday, or paid sick leave are included and assigned the number of hours for which they were paid during the reporting period. The household survey measures the earnings of wage and salary workers in all occupations and industries in both the private and public sectors.
Data refer to the usual earnings received from the worker's sole or primary job.
Data from the establishment survey generally refer to average earnings of production and related workers in mining and manufacturing, construction workers in construction, and nonsupervisory employees in private service-producing industries. The unemployed total from the household survey includes all persons who did not have a job during the reference week, were currently available for a job, and were looking for work or were waiting to be called back to a job from which they had been laid off, whether or not they were eligible for unemployment insurance. In addition, the qualifications for receiving unemployment compensation differ from the definition of unemployment used in the household survey. For example, persons with a job but not at work and persons working only a few hours during the week are sometimes eligible for unemployment compensation, but are classified as employed rather than unemployed in the household survey.