The U.S. Census Bureau has released new data from the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS), which tracks business conditions and forecasts across the United States. The BTOS covers all employer businesses except farms and includes data for companies with multiple locations.
According to the Census Bureau, the survey offers a continuous view of economic measures such as revenues, employment, hours worked, and inventories. Data are collected every two weeks from about 1.2 million businesses nationwide. These businesses are divided into six groups of roughly 200,000 each, with each group asked to report once every 12 weeks throughout the year.
The survey results are published biweekly and provide information by sector, state, and for the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the country. This allows officials at various government levels to use real-time data when making policy decisions or responding to economic events like natural disasters or crises.
On November 17, new questions related to artificial intelligence were added to the survey; findings from these questions will be available in 2026. The Census Bureau estimates that completing the survey takes respondents about nine minutes on average.
A statement from the U.S. Census Bureau said: “BTOS provides insight into the state of the economy by providing continuous, timely data for key economic measures every two weeks. By providing continuous data with geographic and subsector detail, BTOS captures the impact of events like natural disasters and economic crises and assists in monitoring recovery efforts.”
There was no formal news release accompanying this announcement.
