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
145,700
Jobs on performing arts payrolls, seasonally adjusted
June 2026 · preliminary
+2.6% over twelve months.
110.4%
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 2026-08-14.
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.