How $BIRTH is built, what it does and does not claim, how it relates to federal birth statistics, and what the free and licensed tiers permit. If something here is unclear or wrong, tell us — this page is meant to answer the question before you have to ask it.
$BIRTH is a monthly index of realized births in the United States. It is built by ingesting provisional birth data directly from state vital-statistics systems, archiving every version of every file, and assembling the counts on a documented, versioned methodology. It is the supply anchor of the Net Labor Capacity family — the forward labor supply series (S-series) are derived from it by cohort accounting, and the demand series and composites are staged behind those.
The short version: a birth today is a labor-market participant in twenty years, a school enrolment in five, and a childcare place next year. $BIRTH measures the input to all three as it happens rather than years later.
It is the same underlying events, assembled sooner and to a different standard. $BIRTH does not estimate US births independently of the federal system — it reads the same state vital records that eventually flow to NCHS, but it reads them at the state registries rather than waiting for federal aggregation.
Federal provisional natality for a quarter publishes roughly thirteen weeks after that quarter ends, and the annual provisional report roughly fourteen weeks after year end. In practice the first federal estimate covering any given month arrives three to five months after that month. DMX prints on a fixed day — the tenth US business day of the second month after the reference month — which is at least six weeks, and typically eleven, ahead of that first federal estimate.
The second difference is governance. Federal statistical products are built for statistical purposes; they are not versioned, parameter-frozen, revision-logged products designed to be licensed and relied upon contractually. $BIRTH is built to that standard.
No. Only counted births enter the index. There is no fertility forecast anywhere in the construction of $BIRTH — no projection of future birth rates, no demographic model filling in what has not happened yet.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Almost every long-horizon demographic number in circulation is a projection, and projections inherit the assumptions of whoever built them. $BIRTH is a count. The forward series built on top of it (S-5, S-10, S-20) apply cohort accounting on frozen schedules to counts that already happened — deterministic arithmetic on realized events, not a view about the future.
Because the twenty-year labor force is already born, and almost nobody is pricing it from observed data. Pension funds, insurers and labor-intensive corporates commit to liabilities decades out; the size of the future workforce is an input to every one of those commitments, and it has not previously been available as a timely, governed, licensable series.
Shorter horizons are more immediate than the twenty-year framing suggests. Birth cohorts drive childcare and paediatric demand within a year or two, school enrolment within five, and household formation and entry-level labor supply within twenty. Real estate, healthcare, education and staffing exposures all sit somewhere on that curve.
Institutions that have to be right about the next two decades and are currently guessing: pension funds and their consultants, insurers and reinsurers, sovereign and macro funds, real estate developers and operators, healthcare and education systems, and labor-intensive corporates doing long-range workforce planning. Quant and macro research desks license the raw feed.
It is not built for retail use, and the free tier is licensed to organizations rather than individuals.
The first official print has not been published and no launch date is fixed. DMX is onboarding anchor data clients ahead of it. Date not yet fixed
The monthly print day is fixed even though the launch date is not: the tenth US business day of the second month following the reference month, 09:00 New York time, with the calendar published twelve months forward. Against the federal quarterly release that is a lead of at least six weeks, and typically eleven.
The national $BIRTH print is free with registration, published for each reference month once the federal estimate covering it has appeared. Paid tiers currently run at $25,000 per year for the raw index feed, $50,000 per year for regional plus supply series, and custom pricing for the full Net Labor Capacity suite. Founding rates are available to the first cohort on every paid tier in exchange for a multi-year term and reference rights.
Pricing is indicative for anchor-client conversations and final tier terms publish with the first official print. Indicative, pre-launch
Not under the free tier, ever, and not under any tier before the first settlement print. The free-tier licence expressly prohibits using the index or its values as a reference rate, settlement price, valuation input, calculation basis or underlier for any financial instrument or contract, whether or not it trades on a regulated venue.
$BIRTH is not a regulated benchmark. It is designed to align with the IOSCO Principles for Financial Benchmarks — versioned methodology, frozen parameters, published revision policy, archived vintages — because that is the right standard for a series institutions rely on. Designing to a standard is not the same as being an administered benchmark under a regulatory regime, and DMX does not claim to be one.
Settlement values are staged, not hypothetical. The methodology paper specifies the construction — each jurisdiction's count read as it stood at a fixed settlement timestamp and never restated — and settlement values are offered only once at least twelve months of DMX's own archived vintages exist to set that timestamp, at an annual rebalancing announced in advance. From that point, licensed state-level series (Tier 02) are settlement-grade for jurisdictions whose published terms grant redistribution in writing. If a settlement-referenced product is what you need, that is a conversation, not a click-through licence.
Official state vital-statistics systems — the same registries that produce the records behind federal birth statistics — through published state data portals, open-data catalogues and direct data feeds. Fifty-two jurisdictions are surveyed: the fifty states, the District of Columbia, and New York City, which is a separate vital-records jurisdiction from New York State.
Every file DMX ingests is archived with a cryptographic fingerprint, twice daily, and never overwritten. That is what makes any published value reproducible exactly as it was known on any given date — including values that a state has since revised or removed.
Because a birth is registered days to weeks after it occurs. Provisional counts for recent months are systematically incomplete and rise toward their final values as registrations arrive. Every provisional birth series in the world has this property; it is a fact about vital registration, not a defect in a particular data source.
The difference is what you do about it. DMX measures that filing curve from its own archive of prior vintages — it can see how each jurisdiction's counts filled in historically, month by month — and treats the curve as part of the methodology rather than a footnote. On the site's California chart, the trailing months render as open points on a dashed line for exactly this reason: those values are shown as published, not adjusted, and they are marked as still filling in.
Yes, and the answer is different for the two things DMX publishes.
Free-tier and research prints can revise. The index is built from provisional data, and where a source jurisdiction revises its own published counts, the index value can move with it. Revisions are recorded in the revision log that accompanies the print. Any citation of a $BIRTH value must include the print date for this reason — the print date is what identifies which vintage you relied on.
Settlement values do not revise. The settlement construction is vintage-stamped rather than finality-seeking: it reads each jurisdiction's published count for a reference month as that count stood at a fixed settlement timestamp, and revisions after that timestamp never alter the settled value. At launch that timestamp is 180 days after the end of the reference month, with longer lags published for a small number of jurisdictions whose filing behaviour warrants it — both declared interim until confirmed on a year of DMX's own vintages. A manifest-error window applies, and the per-jurisdiction extract is published with every settlement print so the settled value is reproducible from published material rather than from DMX's archive.
This design follows the practice of every instrument we could find that settles on a government statistic — inflation-linked Treasuries, ISDA inflation definitions, CME Class III milk, event contracts on CPI and payrolls — all of which settle on first-published or fixed-timestamp values and disregard later revision.
Between monthly prints, licensed tiers receive a recomputed research value each US business day for the reference months not yet printed. It is labelled indicative, carries its as-of timestamp and credible interval, and is the same construction as the print with more of the month's data in it.
It is not a print. It is never a settlement value, it never appears in the free tier, and its movements are not revisions — a reference month becomes revisable only once it has been printed. The nearest analogy is a real-time index level against an official close, or a Fed nowcast against the official release.
No, and the honest number depends on the channel. A jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction survey found that roughly 72.8% of 2024 US births are reachable from sources that are public today, rising to about 97.2% once sources available on request are included. The panel is assembled from what DMX can actually source, and coverage is a published property of the index rather than an assumption inside it.
Coverage is also not static. Jurisdictions publish at different frequencies, on different schedules, and some publish nothing provisionally at all. The methodology paper states how the panel is defined, how partial coverage is handled, and what the resulting error budget looks like.
Reachable is not the same as redistributable. Of the births DMX can source, 41.3 percent — 14 jurisdictions — carry an explicit written grant to redistribute; the licensed state-level product is bounded by that number and grows as jurisdictions confirm. The national print is not so bounded, because a national aggregate is a derived statistic rather than any one state's series.
Residence. $BIRTH counts births to residents of a panel jurisdiction irrespective of where the delivery took place. That choice matters for a reason that is easy to miss: under occurrence tabulation, a resident of a panel state who delivers in a non-panel state disappears from the count entirely, so coverage becomes a fact about where hospitals are rather than about which residents are covered.
Some states publish their timely provisional data on occurrence basis only — California, the largest jurisdiction, is one. For the settlement construction the read follows a fixed order published per jurisdiction: the state's own residence-tabulated file where it has one; otherwise the federal residence-tabulated provisional series; and only as a disclosed last resort the state's own occurrence count multiplied by that frozen basis factor, flagged as such in the settlement extract. For the research print, occurrence-only sources are converted using a basis factor that is the observed ratio of a jurisdiction's residence-tabulated count to its occurrence-tabulated count for the same period, computed from that jurisdiction's own published finals — not a modelled reallocation of individual records. Those factors are frozen at rebalancing and published in the methodology paper's appendix.
It is a real risk and it is disclosed rather than assumed away. DMX depends on data published by third parties with their own schedules, formats and priorities, and states do withdraw products — one state in the survey had removed a published archive without redirects while its own data guide still cited it.
Two things limit the damage. Every vintage is archived at ingest, so history already collected survives the source disappearing. And the methodology defines how the index behaves when a jurisdiction goes dark, rather than leaving it to be improvised in the moment.
The methodology paper is available on request now and publishes with the free tier. It states the construction, the parameters, the revision policy, and — deliberately — the limitations, including where the index is biased and by roughly how much.
That last part is the point of publishing it. A construction whose weaknesses are documented can be checked; one whose weaknesses are unstated cannot.
The index is designed to align with the IOSCO Principles for Financial Benchmarks: versioned methodology, frozen parameters between rebalancings, a published revision policy, and an archive that makes any historical value reproducible. Those are the properties an auditor or an investment committee would test.
DMX is not currently a regulated benchmark administrator and does not claim to be. Where a specific certification or control attestation matters to your diligence process, ask — the honest answer is more useful to both of us than a logo on a page.
Two controls a settlement counterparty will ask about first are already running: every file that can enter a settlement value is captured on two independently administered sites and admitted only when both captured the same bytes, and each site's capture record is signed and externally time-stamped so it cannot be backdated. Both are specified in the methodology paper's quality controls, and the per-jurisdiction settlement extract lets anyone check a settled value against them.
The national $BIRTH print, published monthly on DMX's print day for the reference month six months back, once the federal estimate covering it has appeared — the two national series, panel-observed and national-estimate, side by side, with the credible interval, the coverage shares, the methodology paper and a summary revision log. It is free to use inside your organization and free to cite publicly with attribution.
It does not include indicative updates between prints, state-level or sub-national series, historical back-series, API or programmatic access, bulk download, the forward labor supply series, the demand series, or the Net Labor Capacity composites. Those are licensed products.
Two reasons, and it is fair to state both. The practical one: DMX's control over the free print rests on contract rather than copyright, because birth counts are facts and facts are not copyrightable. Registration is what makes the licence terms — attribution, no redistribution, no settlement use — actually binding.
The commercial one: knowing who uses the index and for what tells DMX which jurisdictions and which series to build next. Registration asks for an address at your organization's own domain, including your own domain if you work for yourself. If you have no work email there is a route through anyway — independent researchers and journalists are citations worth having.
Source: $BIRTH Index, DMX Analytics Inc. Print of [publication date].
The print date is required, not optional. Values are subject to revision, so a citation without a print date does not identify a specific number and is not compliant attribution. Where the medium allows, a link to dmxanalytics.info is appreciated but not required.
The restrictions are short and they are the ones that matter commercially:
The full terms govern. This is a summary, not a substitute for them.
Time, depth, delivery and rights. The same national number at least six weeks — typically eleven — ahead of the first federal estimate, with daily indicative updates between prints; state-level series, settlement-grade where the jurisdiction grants redistribution in writing; the full historical back-series and complete revision log; API delivery built for direct use in Python, R and Snowflake environments; the forward labor supply series at five, ten and twenty year horizons; and redistribution rights where DMX holds them to grant.
The tier boundary is deliberately one thing — latency — rather than a matrix of features. What you pay for first is getting the number earlier.
That the state series carries a settlement value under the same rules as the national one: the count read as it stood at that jurisdiction's published settlement lag, never restated, reproducible from the per-jurisdiction extract, and protected by the two-site capture check.
Two qualifications, both stated in the methodology paper. State series are delivered only for jurisdictions whose published terms grant redistribution in writing — 14 jurisdictions and 41.3 percent of US births at launch. And for jurisdictions registering fewer than 25,000 births a year, the object a contract may reference is the trailing twelve-month sum rather than the monthly value, because a single small month is too easy to move by the timing of a few filings; monthly values are still published for every jurisdiction.
Under a licensed agreement, yes, and the scope is stated explicitly rather than assumed. DMX can only pass through redistribution rights it has confirmed it holds from the upstream jurisdiction, and those rights vary considerably: some states grant reuse in writing, some grant it conditioned on attribution, some restrict commercial use specifically, and at least one bars redistribution outright.
DMX maintains a per-jurisdiction register of those rights, evidenced to a quoted-source standard and re-verified on a schedule, and the redistribution scope in your agreement is drawn from it. If a downstream product depends on a specific state, ask before signing — the answer is a documented row, not an opinion.
Yes. A 30-day evaluation licence is available on every paid tier: full access, no redistribution, converts or expires. There is no free slice of a paid tier — the intent is a complete look with a hard deadline rather than a permanent partial one. 30 days; 30–90 under discussion
The free tier. Academic research sits deliberately on the free layer rather than behind a five-figure licence — citations are worth more to DMX than the licence fee would be, and pretending a university department has $25,000 for a data feed helps nobody.
Cite with attribution including the print date, do not republish the series itself, and if you need something the free print does not include for a specific piece of work, ask.
If the question you came with is not here, it is worth asking — unanswered questions are how this page gets better.