Microproduct data guidebeginner

O*NET Occupational Database

U.S. occupation titles, skills, and task descriptions for building job-profile and labor-market research tools from published database files.

Start the guide Open official source

At a glance

Difficulty
Beginner — comfortable for a first prototype
Size
Tiny · ≤0.05 GB
Formats
CSV, JSON, Excel
Access
Download
API key
Not required
Provider
National Center for O*NET Development
Updates
Quarterly
Data terms
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

O*NET publishes occupation codes, titles, and descriptions as downloadable database files under CC BY 4.0. Start with the Occupation Data CSV, not the paid-product Web Services free-tier. Titles are a taxonomy, not a vacancy count, and O*NET is a trademark of USDOL/ETA.

1

Check the setup

  • Python 3.10 or newer
  • A notebook environment such as Jupyter or Google Colab
  • An internet connection
2

Access the data

  1. 1.Open the database page and read the CC BY attribution requirements.
  2. 2.Download the published Occupation Data file, not services.onetcenter.org.
  3. 3.Keep O*NET-SOC codes as text and credit O*NET 30.3 Database.
Open official source
3

Run the Python example

Install the packages, then run the notebook cell.

python -m pip install pandas

import pandas as pd

occupations = pd.read_csv(
    "https://www.onetcenter.org/dl_files/database/db_30_3_text/Occupation%20Data.txt",
    sep="\t",
)
print(occupations.head())
print(occupations.columns.tolist())
4

Test a useful signal

Browse published O*NET occupation titles

Test whether the Occupation Data file can power a bounded job-profile lookup.

  1. 01Keep O*NET-SOC code, title, and description as published.
  2. 02Search for one occupation family by title keywords and count matching codes.
  3. 03Attribute O*NET 30.3 Database under CC BY 4.0 and explain that titles are not a measure of hiring demand.

Dataset details

National Center for O*NET Development is a government source. Last verified 2026-08-18. Temporal coverage: current O*NET-SOC occupations with quarterly updates.

Theme

Demographics & Development

Domains

Labor EconomicsOccupationsWorkforce Development

Data types

TabularTaxonomy

Tasks

Labor Market ResearchJob ProfilingSkills Analysis

Geography

United States

Formats

CSVJSONExcel

Provider

National Center for O*NET Development

Data terms

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0