Forecast Signal

Manufacturing Employment by State: Six-Month Forecast

12,594 projected by Mar 2027 (−0.5% from 12,662 in Sep 2026), 80% band 12,523 to 12,664. A six-month statistical projection for manufacturing employment by state, shown with a prediction band and historical backtest error.

The six-month projection

  • Projected for Mar 2027: 12,594, −0.5% versus 12,662 in Sep 2026.
  • Prediction band at the six-month horizon: 80% band 12,523 to 12,664.
  • Direction: Within error. The −0.5% move sits inside the 80% band, so the model cannot call its direction.
  • Out-of-sample backtest error (MAPE): 0.6%, one step ahead on months the model had not seen.

Statistical extrapolation, not a market or policy forecast

  • It knows nothing about the next Fed decision, OPEC action, or policy change. Read the prediction band and the backtest error, not just the central line.
  • This series publishes monthly, so the model forecasts directly on it and is anchored on September 2026, the newest month the source has released. Any gap to today is the agency's publication lag, not a stale model.

How it is built

  • The series is collapsed to one point per month, then projected six months with Holt linear exponential smoothing with a damped trend and no seasonal pattern. The smoothing parameters are grid-searched by walk-forward validation on an early tuning segment, and the reported error is the mean absolute percentage error on a final evaluation segment never used for selection or band calibration. Deterministic: the same data always yields the same forecast.
  • The 80% band is a labelled Gaussian fallback, used because the history is too short to calibrate an empirical residual band.

Download and query it

  • This forecast, its band, and its backtest are free to download (CC BY 4.0) and available as an open, keyless JSON API and an MCP tool.
  • Source: BLS State and Metro Area Employment. Underlying series is U.S. government open data, public domain.

Last reviewed 2026-11-13.