How many aerospace jobs does Los Angeles County have?

Steps

1. No API key. For each year 1990 to 2025 the script read the Los Angeles County file from that year's by-area zip and the NAICS 3364 and 336414 files from that year's by-industry zip (HTTP range requests on the BLS zip files, one at a time). It kept the private-ownership rows named above, checked their titles and aggregation levels, and recomputed every share, index and ratio on this page from the rows. Average annual pay equals total wages over average employment in every published row (within $1.50 plus the effect of rounding employment to a whole job), and annual pay equals 52 times the weekly wage within 1%. The Los Angeles County rows for 2014, 2024 and 2025 were also read through the QCEW CSV slice API and equal the zip values.
2. Private-ownership rows (own_code 5) of QCEW annual averages for Los Angeles County: all industries (NAICS 10, the county private total), NAICS 3364 (aerospace product and parts manufacturing, aggregation level 76) and NAICS 336414 (guided missile and space vehicle manufacturing, level 78). The U.S. comparison is the private-ownership US000 row of the same industries. Employment is covered employment under state unemployment insurance. Average annual pay is total wages divided by average employment, as BLS publishes it; it is a nominal figure. BLS says its NAICS-based files for 1990 to 2000 were reconstructed from data classified under the older Standard Industrial Classification (SIC); 2001 onward is classified under NAICS directly (QCEW Data Files page, https://www.bls.gov/cew/downloadable-data-files.htm).

36 yearly rows (1990 to 2025). Unit: Jobs (annual average of monthly employment), establishments (annual average), dollars (nominal, not adjusted for inflation). Every derived figure on this page (changes, indexes, averages, counts) is computed from the published rows, and the table under each chart says how.

Checks

• 169 published rows were checked: average annual pay equals total wages over employment, and annual pay equals 52 times the weekly wage within 1%. The script stops on any row that fails.
• County rows for 2014, 2024 and 2025 read through the QCEW CSV slice API equal the values from the zip files (estimates, employment, wages, pay).
• NAICS 336414 never exceeds NAICS 3364, which never exceeds county private employment or U.S. NAICS 3364 employment, in any year.
• The script stops if a file name, column, industry title, ownership title or aggregation level changes, or if a Los Angeles County all-industry or NAICS 3364 row is missing or withheld.

Caveats

• QCEW counts jobs covered by unemployment insurance at the establishment's location, so it counts people where they work, not where the company is headquartered. NAICS 3364 is a manufacturing industry: it excludes research, engineering services and defense contractors' headquarters coded in other industries, and it is not the whole of the space economy. Guided missiles and space vehicles (336414) includes missiles as well as space vehicles, and BLS withholds a value when too few employers could be identified, so some years of 336414 have no figure. The 1990 to 2000 figures were reconstructed from the older SIC classification, so the step from 2000 to 2001 is partly a change of method. Pay is nominal: the 1990 figure is not comparable to the 2025 figure without a price index. The most recent year is the first publication and BLS revises annual data once.
• Suppression: BLS withholds a cell (disclosure code N, with zeros in the value columns) when it could reveal one employer. No Los Angeles County cell used here carries that code. NAICS 336414 has 11 years with no row at all (1990 to 2000) and is published every year from 2001. The job counts for 336414 and for 3364 are published values, not estimates.
• Employment is covered employment at the establishment, so a company with its headquarters elsewhere counts where its people work. Self-employed people, most federal contractors' headquarters staff coded in other industries, and engineering services are not in NAICS 3364.

Releases and revisions

• Annual averages for 2025: BLS files stamped Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:06:05 GMT (by area) and Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:05:26 GMT (by industry). Earlier years are the latest published revisions.
• BLS revises annual QCEW data once, in the following year. Next: re-run space_la_aerospace_jobs.py after the 2026 annual averages appear (about August 2027).