Strada’s Clear Outcomes focus area highlights the benefits of a comprehensive and integrated state education and employment data, which includes enhanced wage records.
Which policies and investments are most likely to advance individuals’ economic opportunities while strengthening state economies? Some states have begun adopting a critical tool for understanding this key relationship: enhanced wage records. All states collect some data on employees’ earnings, but those data often offer limited insight for policymakers. These records can help decision-makers gain better insights into the impact of their policies and investments.
Wage records are administrative data collected quarterly as part of the federal-state Unemployment Insurance (UI) program, which provides cash benefits to eligible unemployed workers. Each state administers a separate UI program, following the same guidelines established by federal law, including reporting wage records. All wage records contain an employee’s total wages and provide a rich source of labor market data without creating additional reporting burdens for states.
Wage records are available for most regular, paid employees — covering about 90% of the labor force. While all states report total wages, few collect more detailed information. Enhancing these records by adding fields like job title or location can help identify jobs most likely to create upward mobility, where they’re located and the training needed to access them.
Elements of Enhanced Wage Records
Enhanced wage records allow states to measure job quality thoroughly. Enhanced wage records could include data about:
- Occupation to identify jobs that offer the best economic opportunities.
- Pay rate for more granular information on hourly wages.
- Primary work location to identify regions where occupations are underrepresented or wages are low.
- Worker type to provide better context for reported wage levels (e.g., full-time, apprenticeship, etc.).
- Worker demographics to help understand how different groups of workers are faring.
Enhanced wage record data and subsequent analysis could help key stakeholders, including students and families, policymakers, educational institutions and workforce development agencies, answer crucial questions about how education and training impact future career prospects.
States With Enhanced Wage Records
In the 1980s, Alaska required employers to provide enhanced wage data to better understand the labor market. Today, the state continues to collect this data, including occupation code and geographic location. More recently, several states have added data requirements for wage records to provide insights into characteristics of quality jobs.
South Carolina enacted H.B. 3726, requiring employers to report employees’ social security numbers, names, SOC, total number of hours worked and total wages. South Carolina is working with the Employment and Training Administration to develop a flexible, scalable, and shareable open-source dashboard to harness enhanced wage record data.
Virginia is the latest state to enact legislation that requires additional data collection for wage records. The Virginia Employment Commission is directed to collect job title, pay rate, and work location, and share that information with the Virginia Longitudinal Data System to make available to the Office of Education and Labor Market Alignment.
Washington enacted H.B. 2308 in 2020 to require employers to include standard occupational classifications or job titles in their quarterly reports. The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages provides data used to evaluate labor trends, monitor industry development and develop training programs. The Employment Security Department, which is responsible for collecting Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data, provides a report library online by leveraging data from enhanced wage records to provide in-depth labor market information.
As states consider adding elements to wage records to provide data insights to align education and workforce outcomes, states may consider assessing their current data system capacity, identifying a broad range of stakeholders, and creating dashboards and other information tools to make the data useful and accessible.
