Lightcast geographies include a “county” within each state entitled “[(State), county not reported]”. These regions are used in the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages dataset from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, our primary source for job counts.

Jobs that appear in these “counties” represent headcount for employers who have multiple establishments within a state, but report all those establishments in aggregate, with no geographical distinctions. In these cases the BLS is unable to assign jobs to particular counties, and so reports them all under the county not reported category. To be able to display and include these jobs in state-level estimates, Lightcast also includes them using the “county not reported” geography for each state.

Each state also has a “ZIP not reported” and a non-reported tract, so that a “not reported” bucket exists for each geography for which it might be needed.

This arrangement affects about 2% of jobs in the United States.