Source
U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns (CBP) 2023, county and state files, downloaded from www2.census.gov on 2026-10-27. CBP 2023 is the latest year released. Comparison years: 2022 and 2019. Population: Census Population Estimates (Vintage 2024 for 2022–2023, Vintage 2019 for 2019). Metro areas: OMB delineation file, July 2023. Census data are public domain.
Definitions
Establishment: a single physical location where business is conducted. Employees: paid employees in the pay period including March 12. Annual payroll: all wages paid during the year. Average pay = annual payroll ÷ employees. CBP excludes self-employed people, most government employees, private households and crop and animal production.
Jobs not assigned to a county
CBP reports about 1,927,806 Florida employees “statewide”, without a county — mostly in administrative and support services and in finance and insurance. They are in the Florida totals but in no county page, so the 67 counties add up to about 81% of Florida's jobs. Location quotients and county shares therefore use the sum of the 67 counties as the baseline.
Suppression and noise
The Census Bureau withholds figures that could identify a business and adds noise to employment and payroll. Unpublished cells are shown as not published and are never estimated. High-noise values in small counties should be read as approximate.
Calculations
Location quotient: the industry's share of a county's jobs divided by its share of jobs across the 67 counties. Similar counties: counties whose shares of jobs across published industries differ least on average (in percentage points). Ranks compare the 67 counties. Dollar changes are nominal.
Reading the charts
The industry chart on county pages and on the industries page draws each industry as one bar: its width is the number of jobs and its height the average annual pay, so its area is the industry's payroll. Jobs the Census Bureau does not show by industry (withheld or not classified) are drawn hatched, so the bars add up to the county total.
Rank strips on county pages show the four measures on which the county sits furthest from the middle county: each grey tick is one of the 67 counties, the dashed line is the middle county and the gold dot is the county itself. “What stands out” lists the county's most unusual figures, chosen by how close its rank is to the top or bottom of the 67 (or of the counties where an industry is published). Share of Florida compares the county's residents with Florida's population, and its businesses, jobs and payroll with the 67 counties combined. On industry pages, each circle is a county where the sector is published, placed by the sector's average pay there and sized by its jobs.
A longer explanation with Florida examples is in the guide How to read County Business Patterns figures.