This report is one of a series produced to highlight results from the 2008 American Community Survey (ACS), focusing on changes between the 2007 ACS and the 2008 ACS. The report series is designed to cover a variety of economic topics, such as poverty, occupation, home values, and labor force participation. This series provides information about the changing economic characteristics of the nation and states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The ACS also provides detailed estimates of demographic, social, economic, and housing characteristics for congressional districts, counties, places, and other localities every year. A description of the ACS is provided in the text box “What Is the American Community Survey?”

This report presents data on the construction, extraction, maintenance, and repair occupation group at the national and state levels based on the 2007 ACS and 2008 ACS. Occupational categories are based on the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) 2000. The six major occupational categories based on this classification are management, professional, and related occupations; service occupations; sales and office occupations; farming, fishing, and forestry occupations; construction, extraction, maintenance, and repair occupations; and production, transportation, and material-moving occupations.

This report features the major occupational category construc-tion, extraction, maintenance, and repair occupations in order to high-light changes in the occupational composition of the employed workforce in each state during the 2007 to 2008 time period. The data contained in this report are based on ACS samples that were selected for interview in 2007 and 2008 and are estimates of the actual figures that could have been obtained by interviewing the entire population using the same methodology. All comparisons presented in this report have taken sampling error into account and are significant at the 90 percent confidence level unless noted otherwise. Due to rounding, some details may not sum to totals. For information on sampling and estimation methods, confidentiality protection, and sampling and nonsampling errors, please see the “2008 ACS Accuracy of the Data” document located at <www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/tech_docs/accuracy/accuracy2008.pdf>.