Background

The Labour Force Survey (LFS) is a monthly survey conducted by Statistics Canada involving 50,000 Canadian households. The goal of the survey is to provide a detailed, current picture of the labour market across the country. These files contain both personal characteristics for all individuals in the household and detailed labour force characteristics for household members 15 years of age and over.

The personal characteristics include age, sex, marital status, educational attainment, and family characteristics. Detailed labour force characteristics include employment information such as class of worker, usual and actual hours of work, employee hourly and weekly wages, industry and occupation of current or most recent job, public and private sector, union status, paid or unpaid overtime hours, job permanency, hours of work lost, job tenure, and unemployment information such as duration of unemployment, methods of job search and type of job sought. Labour force characteristics are also available for students during the school year and during the summer months as well as school attendance whether full or part-time and the type of institution.

These variables and more are available by province and for the three largest census metropolitan areas (Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver).

These monthly files are available from 1976 onward.

(The above information is taken from the Labour Force Survey Microdata File Product Main Page).

The monthly files from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) cannot be combined to create an annual file since the LFS has a complex sampling and weighting process. For each month, the weights are adjusted to have all records add up to the estimated population.

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Available Surveys

1992

List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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1993

List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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1994

List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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1995

List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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1996

List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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1997

Questionnaire (pdf) | List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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1998

List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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1999

User Guide (pdf) | List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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2000

User Guide (pdf) | List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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2001

User Guide (pdf) | List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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2002

User Guide (pdf) | List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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2003

User Guide (pdf) | List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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2004

User Guide (pdf) | List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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2005

User Guide (pdf) | List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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2006

User Guide (pdf) | List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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2007

User Guide (pdf) | Questionnaire (pdf) | List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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2008

User Guide (pdf) | List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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2009

User Guide (pdf) | List of Variables (doc) | LFS Products and Services (pdf) | Abbreviations (txt)

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2010

User Guide (pdf) | List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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2011

User Guide (pdf) | Revisions to the LFS (pdf) | List of Variables (doc) | Abbreviations (txt)

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