National indicator
U.S. performing arts employment
Payroll employment at performing arts companies, NAICS 7111, from the national Current Employment Statistics survey — the highest-frequency federal read on the sector's labour base.
Current reading
147,100
Jobs on performing arts payrolls, seasonally adjusted
July 2026 · preliminary
+2.7% over twelve months.
111.4%
Of the February 2020 level
Baseline February 2020
February 2020 is the last full month before the sector's shutdown and is the standard reference for recovery.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics (CES), national, series CES7071110001. Retrieved by Live Index 2026-09-26.
Provenance and access
- Observation period
- 2011-01-01/2026-07-01
- Stored observations
- 187
- Last retrieved
- 2026-09-26 23:52 UTC
- Revision handling
- Agency revisions corrected in place; no back-filling
- Data through
- 2026-07
- Latest stored value
- 147.1 (preliminary)
- Source cadence
- monthly
- Compiler
- Live Index
The stored observations behind this page are available as JSON and CSV. Both files are generated from the same records the chart is drawn from, and carry the agency, programme, series identifier, unit, seasonal-adjustment basis and retrieval timestamp for every row.
How to read it
CES counts jobs on establishment payrolls, not people. A performer holding two payroll engagements appears twice, and self-employed or contract workers do not appear at all — a material omission in a sector that runs substantially on contract labour.
February 2020 is used as the reference month because it is the last full month before the sector's shutdown, which makes it the standard baseline for judging how far employment has returned.
The most recent months are preliminary and are revised as more establishments report. Preliminary months are marked on the series and should not be read as settled.
Derivation
Levels are stored as published in thousands of jobs, seasonally adjusted. The recovery figure is the ratio of the latest published level to the February 2020 level, expressed as a percentage; both are stored observations, not estimates.
Live Index stores the agency's published level for each period and recomputes derived figures from those stored levels on every read. No value is smoothed, interpolated, seasonally re-adjusted or projected, and a period the agency has not published is absent from the series rather than filled.
Limits of the measure
- NAICS 7111 covers performing arts companies broadly — theatre, dance and musical groups — and is not restricted to popular-music touring.
- Payroll counts say nothing about hours, pay or the stability of the engagement.
- Annual benchmarking revises the level of the whole series, so historical comparisons should always be drawn from the current vintage.
Cite this dataset
- Plain
- Live Index, "U.S. performing arts employment", Live Index, September 26, 2026 (updated September 26, 2026), https://liveindex.io/data/national/performing-arts-employment
- APA
- Live Index (2026, September 26). U.S. performing arts employment [Data set]. Live Index. https://liveindex.io/data/national/performing-arts-employment
- Chicago
- Live Index. "U.S. performing arts employment." Live Index, September 26, 2026. https://liveindex.io/data/national/performing-arts-employment.
- BibTeX
- @online{data-national-performing-arts-employment-2026, author = {{Live Index}}, title = {U.S. performing arts employment}, organization = {Live Index}, date = {2026-09-26}, urldate = {2026-09-26}, url = {https://liveindex.io/data/national/performing-arts-employment} }
Live Index compiles and publishes this indicator. The underlying observations are published by U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and are attributed by series identifier above.