A precision luminosity measurement is essential for LHC cross-section measurements to determine fundamental parameters of the standard model and constrain or discover beyond-the-standard-model phenomena.
The luminosity of the CMS detector has been measured at the LHC Interaction Point~5 using proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV during the Run 2 data-taking period (2015-2018). The absolute luminosity scale is obtained using beam-separation scans and the Van der Meer (VdM) method, and several systematic uncertainty sources are investigated, from the knowledge of the scale of beam separation provided by LHC magnets to the nonfactorizability of the spatial components of proton bunch density distributions in the transverse direction. When the VdM calibration is applied to the entire data-taking period, the detector linearity and stability measurements contribute significantly to the total uncertainty in the integrated luminosity. In 2016-2018, the reported integrated luminosity was among the most precise measurements at bunched-beam hadron colliders.