Methodology
Sign Trade Data takes every number from one government census, and prints the industry code, the year and the date the file was read alongside it. There are no projections or modelled values here, and no number was copied in manually.
The source
All figures come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), which is built from the unemployment-insurance tax reports every employer files, so it is a census of employers with payroll rather than a survey. We use the annual averages from 2014 to 2025 for private ownership, industry code NAICS 339950, Sign Manufacturing, by state, read from the BLS open-data files on September 24, 2026.
What a "sign shop" is here
An establishment whose primary activity is manufacturing signs and related displays: electric and non-electric signs, channel letters, monument and storefront signs, printed banners, vehicle graphics and similar. It must have employees on payroll. That means the count leaves out owner-only shops with no staff, general print shops whose main business is paper, engravers, and installation contractors classified under construction codes. It is the narrowest honest definition of the sign trade, and it is the one the government keeps year after year.
Employees and pay
Employment is the annual average of monthly employment across the year's twelve months. Average annual pay is total annual wages divided by that employment, so it blends everyone on a sign shop's payroll, owners drawing a salary, fabricators, designers, installers and office staff, and a state with many part-time workers shows lower average pay for that reason. It is not a wage for one occupation, and no government series offers one for sign work: the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey has no sign occupation (no "sign maker", "sign installer" or "sign fabricator") and publishes sign manufacturing only inside the wider group of miscellaneous manufacturing. The hourly figure on the pay page is weekly pay divided by 40, a rough full-time equivalent, because the census does not record hours.
History
The BLS open-data files carry annual averages from 2014 onward, and every year is read the same way: same industry code, same private ownership. Pay is in current dollars, not adjusted for inflation. A state whose value was withheld in a given year shows a dash for that year.
Metro areas
Metro areas are the Metropolitan Statistical Areas the BLS publishes, named as in its area titles. Their annual figures are released later than the state and national ones, so the metro pages use 2024, compared with 2023, while the state pages use 2025. A metro area that crosses a state line is counted whole, and appears on each of its states' pages. The BLS withholds employment and pay for most metro areas, since a single industry in a single area often has few employers; the establishment count is always published. All 383 metro areas appear on the metro list; those with 20 or more sign shops have their own page.
"Concentration" is the BLS location quotient for establishments: sign shops' share of all private employers in the area, divided by the same share for the whole country. At 1.00× an area has exactly the national share; at 2.00× sign shops are twice as common among its employers as nationally.
Comparison industries
The pay comparisons use the same census for the same year and private ownership: all private employers, all manufacturing (NAICS 31-33), commercial printing (323111), commercial screen printing (323113) and graphic design services (541430).
Withheld values
Where a state has too few sign employers for a figure to be published without identifying one of them, the BLS withholds it. Such values show as a dash and the state is left out of the ranking for that measure. In 2025, 3 states had pay withheld.
Ranks, shares and changes
States and metro areas are ranked by establishment count among those with a published count, and tied metro areas share a rank; "median state" pay is the median of the published state averages. Share of U.S. shops divides a state's count by the national total of 7,672. Changes compare 2025 with 2024 for the same state, ownership and industry code.
Yearly refresh
Each spring the BLS releases the previous year's annual averages, and Sign Trade Data is regenerated once that year is out. Credit Sign Trade Data and the Bureau of Labor Statistics if you reuse a table. To report an error, write to hello@signtradedata.com.