The monthly Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours (SEPH) is one of Statistics Canada's primary business surveys. It has evolved and improved considerably over several decades. Today it is a blend of employment and wage information from all of the payroll deduction submissions to the Canada Revenue Agency plus hours worked data from Statistics Canada's Business Payrolls Survey.

SEPH can be thought of as a counterpart to the Labour Force Survey (LFS). In essence, the former collects data about employment from employers, while the latter does the same from employees. A big difference between the two though is the amount of industry detail that is available. While the latter is a sample survey of households, the former is a census of employers (except for a handful of small-employer industries that are excluded). SEPH offers information about almost 400 industries, while the LFS provides industry information for only about 25.

If you want to explore what SEPH has to offer, an easy way to do so is with my SEPH browser. I invite you to take a look at https://philipmsmith.shinyapps.io/SEPHbrowser/