What one line of the data says
Every county figure on this site is built from three counts. An establishment is a single physical location where business is done, so a grocery chain with nine stores in one county counts nine times. Employees are the people on the payroll in the pay period that includes March 12: one snapshot in mid-March, full-time and part-time alike. Annual payroll is everything those establishments paid in wages during the year.
Average pay, the figure most pages lead with, is annual payroll divided by employees. Two things follow from that. It is not an hourly rate or a typical salary: a county with many part-time jobs shows a low average even when hourly pay is ordinary. And the top of the fraction covers twelve months while the bottom covers one week in March, so a county whose March workforce is unusually large or small for the year will see its average pulled the other way. Across the 67 counties combined, first-quarter payroll was 25.6% of annual payroll, only a little above an even quarter.
What is left out
CBP covers private employers with paid staff. Government is excluded, and so is Public Administration (NAICS 92) as a sector, which is why this site lists 19 industries rather than 20. Public school staff and county employees therefore appear in no county total here. Nor do people who work for themselves without employees.
The exclusion of crop and animal production is easy to miss. The agriculture, forestry and fishing sector in CBP is only what is left after that cut: 7,716 jobs statewide, 0.08% of the Florida total. Farm counties will look less agricultural here than they are.
One in five Florida jobs has no county
CBP files 1,927,806 Florida employees (19.3%) under a “statewide” code instead of a county. They belong to establishments without a fixed county location. Those jobs are part of the Florida totals but appear on no county page, which is why the 67 counties add up to 8,060,702 jobs rather than 9,988,508.
| Where the job is counted | Establishments | Employees | Average pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| In one of the 67 counties | Establishments643,958 | Employees8,060,702 | Average pay$58,882 |
| Statewide, no county | Establishments1,617 | Employees1,927,806 | Average pay$64,742 |
| Florida total | Establishments645,575 | Employees9,988,508 | Average pay$60,013 |
One industry accounts for nearly all of it. Of the 2,373,309 Florida jobs in administrative and support services, 1,808,334 (76.2%) are statewide. The next largest blocks are in finance and insurance and in professional services, far smaller.
| Industry | Florida jobs | No county | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Administrative & support services | Florida jobs2,373,309 | No county1,808,334 | Share76.2% |
| Finance & insurance | Florida jobs472,606 | No county55,561 | Share11.8% |
| Professional & technical services | Florida jobs614,527 | No county22,934 | Share3.7% |
| Wholesale trade | Florida jobs365,417 | No county12,132 | Share3.3% |
| Information | Florida jobs175,767 | No county7,161 | Share4.1% |
For that reason this site measures county shares and location quotients against the sum of the 67 counties, not the state total. It also explains why the Florida average pay of $60,013 sits above the 67-county average of $58,882: the statewide records pay $64,742 on average.
Withheld numbers are unknown, not zero
The Census Bureau does not publish a figure if it could reveal an individual business. Of the 1,273 county-and-industry cells in Florida (67 counties × 19 industries), 111 are not published. Only 27 counties have all 19 industries published; Liberty County has 10.
The data mark these cells as fewer than three establishments or otherwise not published, so withholding is most common in industries that have few establishments in a county: mining and quarrying is published for 30 counties, management of companies is published for 40 counties, utilities is published for 56 counties. Employment-size classes are withheld in part for 44 of the 67 counties.
When an industry is withheld, the published industries do not add up to the county total. The gap is largest in Bradford County (290 jobs) and Hardee County (166). County pages draw that gap as a hatched block labelled “not shown by industry”, and never fill it with an estimate.
How exact the figures are
Before publishing, the Census Bureau adds a small amount of noise to employment and payroll to protect individual businesses, and flags how much each figure was changed. County totals are well protected by their size: 62 of 67 have the lowest flag for employment. The exceptions are small counties: DeSoto County, Glades County, Hamilton County, Lafayette County, Liberty County.
Industry cells inside a county are noisier, because they are smaller.
| Noise flag | Meaning | Industry cells | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| G | Meaningunder 2% noise | Industry cells661 | Share56.9% |
| H | Meaning2% to 5% | Industry cells319 | Share27.5% |
| J | Meaning5% or more | Industry cells182 | Share15.7% |
A J-flagged cell is best read as an order of magnitude. That matters most for the pay of small industries in small counties, where one employer can make up most of the cell.
Dollars are not adjusted for prices
All payroll and pay figures are in current dollars. Florida's average pay in CBP rose from $48,184 in 2019 to $60,013 in 2023, 24.6% in nominal terms. This site does not convert those figures for price changes, so a rise in average pay should not be read as the same rise in buying power.
Reading a county page
A county page puts these rules into practice. The opening sentence gives establishments, jobs and average pay with the county's rank among 67. The bar chart below it shows every industry, with withheld jobs hatched. The rank strips place the county among all the others, and the ledger table lists each industry's jobs, pay and change since 2019, with a note naming the industries the Census Bureau did not publish. Alachua County is a good example of a county with all 19 industries published; Liberty County shows what a sparse county looks like.
To set two counties next to each other on the same definitions, use the county comparer. The methodology page has the formulas.
Data as of: 2023 County Business Patterns (released 2025); population July 1, 2023 (Vintage 2024 estimates); retrieved October 27, 2026. Dollar amounts are nominal (not adjusted for inflation). Statistics for general information, not career, business or investment advice.
Sources
- U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023 (county and state files). www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/datasets/2023/
- U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2022 and 2019 (comparison years). www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/datasets/
- U.S. Census Bureau, Population Estimates Program, county totals Vintage 2024 (2022, 2023) and Vintage 2019 (2019). www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/datasets/
- U.S. Census Bureau / OMB, Core Based Statistical Area delineation file, July 2023 (OMB Bulletin 23-01). www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/metro-micro/geographies/reference-files/2023/delineation-files/list1_2023.xlsx