U.S. Census Bureau releases business trends survey data for economy tracking

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U.S. Census business trends survey

Highlights

The U.S. Census Bureau launched biweekly Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS) data releases covering employer business conditions and expectations nationwide.
BTOS samples about 1.2 million businesses excluding farms, collecting information on revenue, workforce, hours, and inventory across six panels reporting every 12 weeks.
Data are available by sector, state, and the 25 largest metropolitan areas, enabling policymakers and businesses to monitor economic trends and post-crisis recoveries with greater frequency.

Biweekly survey rollout and coverage

As reported by U.S. Census Bureau, the agency today releases new data products from the Business Trends and Outlook Survey, an ongoing survey of business conditions and expectations for future activity.

The survey continues to collect data that complement key measures covered in other economic surveys, including revenue, employee counts, hours worked and inventories. BTOS data are representative of employer businesses across the U.S. economy, excluding farms, and are published every two weeks with geographic and subsector detail.

The sample includes about 1.2 million businesses, with biweekly collection organized through six panels of roughly 200,000 cases each. Selected businesses are asked to report every 12 weeks for a year, and the Census Bureau estimates the average response takes about nine minutes, including time to review instructions and answers.

Value for officials, regions and businesses

Regular releases are available by sector, by state and for the 25 most populous metropolitan statistical areas, giving public officials frequent data points for economic monitoring. The survey is intended to help local, state and federal decision-makers respond to changing conditions and assess recovery efforts after disruptions such as natural disasters and economic crises.

For companies, the data provide a broader operating snapshot that can inform economic decisions with more timely local and industry detail. The Census Bureau says the continuous structure of the survey helps track the state of the economy on an ongoing basis rather than through less frequent reporting cycles.

In our earlier article on CEO adoption of AI agents, we covered survey findings showing many large U.S. companies are seeing efficiency or growth gains, but few leaders view AI agents as truly transformational so far. The piece also noted that executives generally expect head counts to rise, alongside continued retraining efforts and sustained investment in AI infrastructure and talent.

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