Monthly Wholesale Trade Report Data: Dataset Structure and Field Coverage

The report is the Monthly Wholesale Trade Survey (MWTS) - Sales & Inventories, the US Census Bureau's monthly estimate program for NAICS 42 merchant wholesalers. Three measures ship together: sales, end-of-month inventories and the inventories/sales ratio, each broken out by NAICS 42 kind of business - from total merchant wholesalers through durable goods (423), nondurable goods (424) and electronic markets and agents (425) down to 4/5-digit industry lines.

Coverage is national totals only: there is no state or metro cut anywhere in the file. Granularity, not geography, is why analysts choose it over press-release summaries - a grocery wholesaler can read its own 4-digit line rather than an all-trade average.

The NAICS Association - NAICS 42 Wholesale Trade Code Directory makes that mapping concrete before you open a workbook: roughly 70 wholesale-trade codes on its sector page, running from the 2-digit sector down to 6-digit national industries, each carrying definitions and US entity counts.

Datadory catalogs three monthly Census wholesale-trade sources across different industry slices, and they are easy to confuse. All three describe the same survey program, but they differ in packaging: one is the report proper, one bundles wholesale with retail, and one is API-only. Two further Census records extend the picture with five-year benchmarks and county-level queries.

1. Pull the three workbooks. Sales, end-of-month inventories and inventories/sales ratios land as separate ~180 KB Excel files; grab all three in one pass rather than rebuilding history month by month.
2. Map your categories to NAICS 42 lines. Use the NAICS Association directory's definitions, entity counts and SIC crosswalk references to select the matching 3-digit subsector or 4/5-digit industry columns.
3. Automate the refresh. Point a scheduled job at the JSON API with a free Census key, or route through CEPREMAP's DBnomics — World's Economic Database, which serves 1.73 billion series from 93 providers behind one JSON API with Python and R clients, refreshed daily.
4. Add downstream demand context. The ONS Business, Industry and Trade - Wholesale & Retail hub ships the UK Retail Sales Index as a ~2.5 MB CSV with hundreds of series columns reaching into the 1980s under OGL v3.0.
5. Benchmark every five years. Rebase your monthly reads against the Economic Census wholesale-trade profile when a new vintage lands.
6. Archive vintages. Annual revisions apply back to 1997, so store each retrieval date with every snapshot.

Three workflows dominate, and each leans on a different part of the file:

• Purchasing and inventory planners time order books against the national cycle. They compare their category's inventories/sales column with the same month a year earlier - the seasonality-safe comparison - and treat sustained divergence between their own stock position and their NAICS 42 line as an ordering signal.
• Market researchers sizing distribution demand benchmark a niche against its parent subsector. Drilling from total merchant wholesalers to durable goods (423) or nondurable goods (424), then to a 4/5-digit industry line, shows whether a segment is gaining or losing share of national wholesale sales.
• Sales and growth teams building account lists work the supply side instead: the NAICS 42 directory's roughly 70 codes come with per-code US entity counts and linked company-search tools at the 6-digit level, turning the classification layer into a prospecting frame.

For teams assembling any of these views alongside other sources, our best data for distributors teams page maps the full stack by role.

Not from MWTS - its geography field is a single United States national total. When sub-national wholesale numbers matter, the Census programs built for geography take over. The U.S. Economic Census - Wholesale Trade (NAICS 424) reports establishment counts, sales, payroll and employment for merchant wholesalers - including 4244 grocery and 4248 beer/wine/spirits lines - down to county level, on the five-year cycle.

For annual coverage between benchmarks, the U.S. Census Bureau Data API - CBP / Economic Census / Wholesale Trade serves roughly 1,800 Census datasets in JSON, JSONP, XML and CSV, including County Business Patterns back to 1986, queryable by NAICS code and geography. A practical stack pairs the monthly national report for timing with these two for place-level structure - the monthly file says when to move, the county files say where.