You can also access this resource in issue 339 of my Talent Edge Weekly newsletter.
Many HR practitioners track headline job numbers without access to disaggregated demographic data on employment and labor force participation. While headline data is a useful starting point, segmenting it can help HR practitioners bring more granular supply-side analysis into workforce planning. This open-access interactive labor market tracker from The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, updated February 25, 2026, helps do that. The tool allows users to explore employment, labor force participation, and unemployment trends by sex, age, race and ethnicity, nativity, education, disability status, and parental status, enabling a more nuanced view of workforce supply than standard Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases typically provide. The latest update also reflects significant revisions to January 2026 population estimates after the Census Bureau incorporated updated migration data, reducing measured labor force and employment levels and lowering the labor force participation rate. That serves as an important reminder that even official labor market data is subject to meaningful revision and that workforce plans built on point-in-time assumptions may carry more uncertainty than many planning processes acknowledge. For HR practitioners tracking labor supply in specific talent pools, this is an open-access resource worth bookmarking.
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