Data Spotlight: Using LEHD for Workforce Mobility Analysis

At Place Signals, our "Intelligence Spine" is built on a stack of useful public data. ACS helps answer who lives where. LEHD helps answer how people actually move through the labor market.

If you want to understand the real pull of a commercial district, LEHD is where the story starts.

What is LEHD?

LEHD is a partnership between the Census Bureau and state labor market agencies. It combines administrative records with Census and survey data to show the relationship between where people live and where they work.

The piece we use most is LODES, the origin-destination employment dataset.

Why LEHD matters for site selection

Population data tells you how many people live in a ZIP code. For a business, that is only part of the picture. Daytime population often matters more than nighttime population, because lunch exists and so does the workday.

LEHD allows us to calculate: 1. Inflow-Outflow Patterns: How many people commute into a neighborhood for work vs. how many residents leave for jobs elsewhere? 2. Labor Sheds: From how far away does a specific industrial park or retail corridor draw its workforce? 3. Worker Characteristics: What is the income level, industry (NAICS), and educational attainment of the people who actually spend their days in this location?

The post-remote shift

Hybrid work changed the shape of the weekday map.

Some downtown areas lost a little of their old lunch-hour gravity. At the same time, secondary hubs started to matter more because people kept working, just not always in the old direction.

Technical tip: LODES and H3

Because LEHD data is available at fine geographic resolution, we can map it with a lot of precision. We aggregate it into our H3 Hexagonal Grid so the analysis follows the actual movement pattern instead of the nearest arbitrary boundary.

When we combine LEHD inflow data with transit signals, we get a more honest picture of where the workday is actually happening.

Leverage the signal

Whether you are optimizing a retail footprint or advising a city on transit investments, LEHD helps reveal where the workforce is really flowing.

Want to see the inflow-outflow patterns for your target area? Explore our Intelligence Spine documentation to see how we integrate LEHD into every report.

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Find your signal. Understand the flow.