Downloads Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and returns them as a tibble. OEWS estimates include employment counts and wage percentiles by Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) code.
Usage
onet_oews(
type = c("national", "state", "metro", "industry"),
year = latest_oews_year(),
path = NULL,
cache_dir = tools::R_user_dir("onet2r", "cache"),
force = FALSE,
quiet = TRUE
)Arguments
- type
OEWS file type:
"national","state","metro", or"industry".- year
Integer estimate year. Defaults to the most recent May estimates assumed available (previous calendar year from April onward, two years back before April). If BLS has not yet published that release, the download fails - pass the prior year explicitly.
- path
Optional path to a manually downloaded OEWS ZIP, CSV, TXT, DAT, or Excel file. If supplied, no download is attempted.
- cache_dir
Directory used to cache the downloaded BLS ZIP file.
- force
Logical; if
TRUE, re-download even when a cached file exists.- quiet
Logical; if
FALSE, show download progress.
Value
A tibble of OEWS estimates with year, oews_type, and snake_case
OEWS columns. Special OEWS markers are preserved as indicator columns when
present: # as top-coded, * as wage suppressed, ** as employment
suppressed, and ~ as less than 0.5 percent.
Details
Wage-field semantics
OEWS publishes both hourly (h_*) and annual (a_*) wage fields. Some
occupations are annual-only (annual = TRUE; e.g., teachers) or
hourly-only (hourly = TRUE; e.g., actors) - their missing counterpart
fields are structural, not suppressed. Suppression and top-coding are
flagged separately (see the *_topcoded and suppression indicator
columns). *_prse columns are percent relative standard errors of the
corresponding estimates.
BLS download blocking
BLS may reject automated ZIP downloads with HTTP 403 even when the same URL
downloads in a browser. onet_oews() handles that case in three steps:
first it checks the package cache, then it looks for the matching ZIP in your
Downloads folder, then in interactive sessions it opens the official BLS URL
in your browser and waits for the downloaded file to appear. Set
options(onet2r.oews_download_dir = "path/to/downloads") to search a
different manual-download folder. Set
options(onet2r.oews_browser_fallback = FALSE) to disable opening a browser.
Set options(onet2r.oews_browser_wait = 120) to control how many seconds
onet_oews() waits for a browser download. You can always pass a ZIP path
directly with path; this is the stable fallback if BLS changes OEWS URLs or
file names.
Examples
if (FALSE) { # interactive()
oews <- onet_oews("national", 2024)
head(oews)
}