How to Conduct a Labor Market Survey

Setting the Parameters Before You Pick Up the Phone

A rehabilitation counselor sits across from opposing counsel at a deposition. The question comes fast: how many employers did you actually contact, and can you produce the log? The counselor has two employer names jotted on a sticky note, a voicemail that was never returned, and a report paragraph that reads "the labor market for this occupation is favorable." The opinion gets discounted — not because the underlying labor market analysis was wrong, but because nothing behind it looked like fieldwork. It read as an assertion.

A labor market survey is fieldwork, full stop. It is the process of confirming, employer by employer, that vacancies in a target occupation actually exist within a defined commuting area, at a defined wage, at a specific point in time. Done with discipline, it becomes the evidentiary backbone of a vocational opinion. Done as a paragraph of adjectives, it becomes the easiest thing in the file for opposing counsel to attack.

Learning how to conduct a labor market survey that holds up under cross-examination starts before a single phone call is made — it starts with parameters. Three decisions anchor everything that follows:

• Occupation. The survey should target the specific occupation(s) identified through a transferable skills analysis or DOT-to-O*NET/SOC crosswalk, not a broad job family. "Administrative support worker" is too wide; "general office clerk" tied to a specific SOC code is workable.
• Geographic radius. Define the commuting area explicitly — miles, drive time, or a metro/county boundary — and hold every employer contact to that boundary. What counts as a "reasonable" commuting distance is not standardized nationally; definitions vary by jurisdiction and by the rules of the referring carrier or court, so confirm the applicable standard rather than assuming a default mileage figure applies everywhere.
• Timeframe. A survey reflects labor market conditions at the time contacts were made. How recent those contacts must be to remain useful in a given proceeding is another point that varies by jurisdiction and by opposing counsel's expectations — build the survey to a defensible recency standard rather than treating "recent enough" as self-evident.

The full method for how to conduct a labor market survey breaks into five stages after parameters are set: identifying employers, contacting and logging them, verifying distance and availability, and assembling the findings into a report. Each stage is described below.

Identifying Employers Worth Contacting

Once the occupation and geography are fixed, the next task is building a real employer list — not a directory dump. Useful sources include current job postings for the target occupation and SOC code within the defined radius, employer relationships built through prior placements, industry and trade association directories, and local chamber-of-commerce listings.

This is also the point where published wage data earns its place — as a benchmark, not a substitute for employer contact. Federal wage estimates for an occupation are built from a large, ongoing sample of establishments; that scale is exactly why aggregate data is useful for setting expectations and exactly why it cannot replace direct employer verification. Aggregate estimates tell you what a regional wage distribution looks like in general; they cannot confirm that a specific employer, in a specific commuting area, has an actual opening today. A defensible labor market survey uses published wage data to frame the range and uses direct employer contact to confirm that the range is real on the ground.

Aim for enough employer contacts to demonstrate a genuine sampling of the local market for the occupation — not a token two or three calls. How many is "enough" is itself something that varies by jurisdiction and by what a given fact-finder expects to see; treat the employer list as a working draft that gets pared down to the employers who actually respond with usable information.

Logging Every Employer Contact

This is the stage most surveys fail at, and it is the single easiest thing for opposing counsel to attack when it's missing. Every employer contact needs a record, not a memory. At minimum, the log should capture: date and time of contact, employer name and location, contact person and title, method of contact (phone, email, in-person, online posting review), the specific position discussed, current hiring status, wage or wage range quoted, and any follow-up needed.

The point of the employer contact log is not paperwork for its own sake — it's what turns "the labor market is favorable" into a reproducible record. If a survey can't be reconstructed from its own log, it can't be defended, and if it can't be defended, it shouldn't be the basis of a wage-earning-capacity opinion. Build the habit of logging in real time, during or immediately after each contact, rather than reconstructing details from memory at the end of the week.

Consistency matters more than volume here. A log of eight thorough, contemporaneous contacts is more defensible than a log of twenty contacts recorded from memory two weeks later.

Verifying Commuting Distance and Job Availability

Once contacts are logged, each one needs to be checked against the parameters set at the outset — not just recorded, but validated. Two questions do most of the work: Is this employer actually within the defined commuting area? And is the position discussed actually available, or was it a posting that's already closed, a role requiring credentials the worker doesn't hold, or a wage below the target range?

This is where commuting distance and job availability intersect directly with the survey's credibility. A contact that's technically within the metro area but well outside any reasonable commute for the individual worker — accounting for transportation access, not just map distance — weakens the survey if it's presented uncritically. Likewise, a contact logged as "hiring" based on a stale online posting, without a live confirmation, invites exactly the kind of cross-examination that unravels an otherwise solid survey.

Document the verification step itself, not just the outcome. A note that says "confirmed via phone call with HR, 3/14, position still open" is worth far more than a checkbox.

Assembling Findings Into a Defensible Report

The findings section is where the fieldwork becomes an opinion. A defensible labor market survey methodology generally organizes the report into distinct sections: the parameters used (occupation, geography, timeframe), the methodology followed (how employers were identified and contacted), a findings table summarizing each contact and its outcome, and a limitations section acknowledging what the survey does and doesn't establish.

That limitations section is not boilerplate — it's part of what makes the report credible. A survey that identifies five confirmed openings within the commuting radius supports a specific, bounded claim: that jobs matching the target occupation existed, at roughly that wage, within that area, as of that date. It does not, on its own, establish that the individual worker would be hired, or that conditions will hold six months later. Stating that boundary plainly is what separates a professional work product from an overstated one.

For a sense of how these pieces come together in a finished document, a sample labor market survey report walks through the structure section by section — useful as a reference point before drafting the first one from scratch.

Common Mistakes That Weaken a Labor Market Survey

A few patterns show up again and again in surveys that don't hold up:

• Stale data presented as current. A survey built on job postings pulled once and never re-verified drifts out of date quickly; positions close, wages shift, and a report that doesn't reflect that looks careless.
• No contact log, or a log built after the fact. Memory is not documentation. If a contact isn't logged contemporaneously, treat it as unverified.
• Leaning on aggregate wage data alone. Regional wage estimates set expectations; they don't confirm a specific opening exists. A survey built entirely from published data with no employer contact isn't a labor market survey — it's a wage table.
• Ignoring jurisdiction-specific rules. Commuting-distance standards, survey-currency windows, and even what counts as an acceptable contact method differ by jurisdiction and by referral source. Assuming last year's case's standard applies to this one is a routine — and avoidable — error.
• Treating the survey as a formality rather than fieldwork. The strongest surveys read like what they are: a documented, verifiable process, not a summary written to support a conclusion already reached.

Building the Habit Around a Template

Learning how to conduct a labor market survey once is useful. Doing it the same disciplined way every time — same parameter checklist, same contact log fields, same report structure — is what actually holds up across a caseload of dozens of files and multiple jurisdictions. For background on where the labor market survey fits within a broader vocational rehabilitation practice, the labor market survey overview is a useful starting point.

To skip rebuilding the parameter checklist, contact log, and report template from scratch on every file, the Labor Market Survey Documentation Kit packages the structure described above — parameters worksheet, employer contact log, and report template — into a ready-to-use set.