United States - Nonfarm business: All persons - Hours

Productivity represents the U.S.'s efficiency in producing goods and services. It is estimated as output per unit of input. Quarterly and annual from 1947.

Productivity is defined as the ratio of output (the numerator) to input (the denominator). Output is represented by the Gross Product of business sectors, and input is represented by the corresponding labor hours. Labor hours are the product of employment multiplied by average weekly hours converted to average annual hours. The employment data are based on the sum of paid jobs counted in the payroll survey and the number of self-employed and unpaid family workers counted in the household survey.

For quarterly unit labor cost indices, the average of four quarters will not equal the corresponding annual index exactly. The annual indices are obtained as a quotient of annual compinsation and output series, which are the four-quarter averages of their respective series. This will cause minor discrepencies in the quarterly/annual data comparisons.

Series end dates vary because data for some series is available sooner than other series. 

• For Quarters 1 through 3, Nonfinancial Data is released with the revised Productivity and Costs, not with the preliminary release.
• For Quarter 4, Nonfinancial Data is released with the preliminary Quarter 1 release for the next year because the BEA profit data lags even further with the Q4 data. Therefore, the revised Quarter 4 release will not contain Q4 nonfinancial data.

Data is update twice a quarter, the second upate is to capture revisions. Annual revisions are made every September, and still more comprehensive benchmark revisions are made about every six years. Prior base years in Data Buffet are 1992, 2005 and 2009.