Employment Cost Index (ECI)

Employment Cost Index (ECI)

The Employment Cost Index (ECI) is based upon a quarterly survey and is available only for the months of March, June, September, and December each year. Because the ECI has relatively little industry detail at present, data users may have to use a higher level of aggregation than they do with PPI data. However, the Employment Cost Index is a highly useful measure of labor costs because it covers all workers (not just production and nonsupervisory workers) and because it includes not only wages and salaries but also employer costs for employee benefits. Like the PPI, the ECI is a fixed-weight index and this is not influenced by employment shifts among industries and occupations with different wage and benefit levels.

Related Pages

Consumer Price Index, Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPIW)

Escalation and Economic Indexes