Every paycheck an employer cuts, a slice of withheld income and payroll tax is remitted to the Treasury the same way — and that cash flow shows up in the Daily Treasury Statement. Since withholding is a function of employment × hours × wages, it is a census-like, near-real-time read on aggregate labor income: no sampling error, no revisions, and it turns weeks before payrolls do.
This section presents data on U.S. government withheld taxes. Given its daily frequency, this series can serve as a contemporaneous indicator of employment and nominal aggregate demand. You may select multiple years for comparison.
How to use it: The raw daily series is extremely noisy — deposit dates drift with payroll calendars and settlement days, and month-ends, quarter-ends and holidays all shift receipts around — so the right way to read it is YoY growth of rolling cumulative sums, which is exactly what the multi-year calendar overlay on this page is built for: same calendar position against same calendar position. Its value is statistical independence: withholding shares none of the CES machinery — no sample, no birth-death imputation, no benchmark revisions — so when smoothed withholding growth and reported payrolls disagree, the disagreement is itself information about the likely direction of future revisions; when they agree, the read on labor income deserves more confidence. Two caveats: bonus season (December–January) amplifies swings, and tax-code changes (like the 2018 withholding-table revision) create level breaks that poison cross-year comparisons.