Covered employment data consist of most full- and part-time, private and government, wage and salary workers. These worker counts are interpreted as counts of jobs on a place-of-work basis and represent the number of workers on the payroll during the pay period including the 12th day of the month. The database includes private sector employees that are covered under the New Mexico Unemployment Compensation Law (UI). This law and separate acts extend coverage to workers in households, non-profits, most state and local government entities, federal workers, and parts of the agricultural sector. About 97% of nonagricultural workers are in the database. Exclusions are as follows: independent insurance and real estate agents working solely on commission; students in the employ of the school, college or university in which they are enrolled and regularly attending classes; services performed in the employment of churches or church-sponsored organizations operated primarily for religious purposes; most railroad workers; the self-employed; unpaid volunteers or family workers; members of the military; and services performed in agricultural and nonagricultural labor when the employing unit does not meet the employment and payroll requirements for coverage, i.e., workers are not covered if their employers have total payrolls or employee counts that fall below the minimum thresholds required for coverage.
Prior to June 2006 Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) workers were also excluded because they were employees of the State of California and were covered under California rather than New Mexico UI law. However, in June 2006 Los Alamos National Security, LLC, (a group of private and public organizations) replaced the University of California as the management and operating contractor at LANL. Because of this change in lab management, LANL was assigned to the professional & technical services sector and lab employment was recorded in this database for the first time.