Trick or Treat: Halloween-Related Employment Fun Facts!

For thousands of years, Halloween has been associated with witches, vampires, and ghosts. During the years, the holiday has evolved from traditions from Celtic harvest festivals to child-friendly activities, such as trick-or-treating, pumpkin carving, and wearing funny costumes.

In Oregon, there were about 483,000 potential trick-or-treaters ─ children ages 5 to 14 ─ in 2015 according to the U.S. Census. Of course, many children under the age of five and older than 15 also went trick-or-treating. Last year, they had about 1.5 million occupied housing units to visit across the state.

Trick-or-treaters dress up in Halloween costumes that portray real professions*, such as:

• Firefighters: roughly 3,800 firefighters work in Oregon.
• Police officers: Oregon has 5,200 police and sheriff’s patrol officers.
• Doctors: about 65,700 health care diagnosing and treating practitioners were employed statewide.
• Veterinarians: we have 1,420 veterinarians in the state.
• Chefs: about 1,600 chefs and head cooks work in Oregon. 
• Construction workers: 70,500 construction trades workers were employed in 2014.

In Oregon, there were 122 sewing, needlework and piece goods establishments in 2015. Many of these establishments are inclined to create homemade costumes for trick-or-treaters. In 2015, there were 43 chocolate and non-chocolate confectionery establishments and 179 farms that harvested pumpkins for sale.

Happy Halloween!

*All jobs estimates are for 2014 unless otherwise noted.