This page contains a non-exhaustive list of sources from federal, state, and municipal governments where you can locate data provided by the government. There are some other government data sources listed on other pages in this guide as well. Be sure to check them out too!
This box contains a list of some sources where you can find data from various federal government departments. This is not an exhaustive list.
Many states and municipalities provide publicly-accessible data repositories for the data they are required to make available to the public (and then occasionally some other data sets.) A few are listed below, and you can often locate data for a specific state or municipality by searching for the state or city name + "data."
NYC Open Data is one of the most robust examples of an open municipal data source. (You can also find some of these data sets through the NYS portal and data.gov, but this is the most comprehensive site.) Below is a link to the NYC Open Data portal, along with an article from April 2020 that discusses how publicly available trash pickup data from the Department of Sanitation could be used as a predictor to figure out which neighborhoods had the most people leave the city during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Federal, state, and local governments are required to make certain data available. In some cases, this includes hiring and job-related data. While this type of data can be very difficult to find from private companies, government data can be just as insightful and a useful proxy for this type of private company data as well.
Note: This is not an exhaustive list. These are just examples of the types of government hiring data available. Data may be available for other states and municipalities.
A U.S. Census Bureau dataset that measures the number of state and local civilian government employees and their gross monthly payroll for March of the survey year. The dataset divides the data by state and government function, and provides tables for state employees and local municipal employees (but aggregates the local data up to the state level.) Data are also available on data.census.gov.