Quarterly Services Survey

The sample includes approximately 19,500 service businesses with paid employees that operate in the covered sectors. Those in the sample can choose to respond though mail, fax, internet reporting, or by telephone. In order to be eligible for the list sample, service businesses must be in the Business Register (BR), which contains all Employer Identification Numbers (EINs) for listed businesses and locations of multi-establishment companies. EINs may represent one or more establishments, and firms may have one or more EINs.

The sample is updated quarterly to reflect births and deaths, adding new employer businesses identified in the Business and Professional Classification Survey, and deleting firms and EINs that are no longer active. During interim periods, service non-employers and businesses are represented by administrative records data or imputed values.

Questionnaires are mailed to a probability sample of firms selected from the larger Service Annual Survey (SAS) sample. The sample includes firms of all sizes; however, firms without paid employees (nonemployers) are not included in the estimates. The Quarterly Services survey is conducted quarterly with the mail out occurring at the end of each calendar quarter. The survey form is due 14 days after the end of the reference period. A new sample will be selected about every five to seven years. The QSS is released online, approximately every 75 days, after each calendar quarter. For more information, see: https://www.census.gov/services/qss/how_the_data_are_collected.html

To link to external business data, also request County Business Patterns Business Register.

• Employer Identification Number (EIN)
• County FIPS code
• State FIPS code
• State abbreviation
• Zip code
• Other (see Linkage Capabilities description)