The U.S. labor market created far fewer jobs than previously thought, according to a Labor Department report Tuesday that added to concerns both about the health of the economy and the state of data collection.

Washington

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics has issued a significant downward revision to its payroll data, reducing job growth figures by 911,000 for the period from April 2024 through March 2025. This adjustment brings the monthly job growth rate from an estimated 147,000 to 70,000, indicating much weaker employment gains than previously reported.

The revision primarily affects the private sector, with notable reductions in trade, transportation, utilities, retail, leisure, hospitality, and professional services. Analysts note that the scale of this revision is unusually large compared to historical averages, raising questions about the reliability of recent labor data collection and processing methods.

Job growth revised down by 911,000 through March

world. We are getting those payrolls revision. Let's go to Steve Leesman who's been looking into that. Steve what do you see. I see the biggest revision we've had. I go back 25 years here. This may be the biggest revision ever. Sarah we minus nine hundred and eleven thousand payroll growth from April of twenty twenty four through March of twenty twenty five is nine hundred and eleven thousand less than previously reported. What has happened now to the month over month or the monthly growth rate has gone from what we thought was one hundred and forty seven thousand a month to now just seventy thousand a month. So one point seven million jobs is now eight hundred and forty seven thousand jobs created over that period. So over that time period payrolls were quite a bit weaker. Remember this is the period ending five months ago. This is the annual benchmark revisions that's done every year. This is a preliminary number. Over time it tends to actually be revised a little bit higher. The revision to the revision ends up being a little bit higher. But right now it's suggesting much weaker payroll growth. I will point out that this is definitely the high side of what I've seen from Wall Street analysts. And now you have to plug in your you know you have to start thinking about what does this say about today. In other words this data is five months so we won't know until the final revisions in February which month each of the week this belongs to. But we do know a bit about which industries it belongs to. And we have a chart here. Eight hundred eighty thousand from the private sector. The biggest revision came from trade transportation and utilities of two hundred and twenty six thousand one hundred and twenty six thousand off in retail leisure and hospitality. One hundred and seventy six thousand professional services down one hundred fifty eight thousand. So widespread in the I don't see it here. Not a lot in private education and health services. We was a big. You can see the recent revisions there. The second biggest revision that I have Sarah in my records is 2009 in the wake of the great financial crisis. And what had happened in that situation was some of the modeling was wrong. Some of the birth death of businesses was wrong. This may be the case right now. We might have come into this year with much more weakness than we thought we had in the job market. It was OK. It seemed to be like the unemployment rate remained relatively stable. So whatever we were doing was OK to keep the unemployment rate a separate survey relatively low. But we were not creating as many jobs as we thought. And whether and I know that some Fed officials Chris Waller among them think this is part of a broader story of weakness in the job market that should cause the Federal Reserve to cut. And we'll see what happens now to the. I don't know if we're able to get you right away a an update on the Fed funds futures. But certainly the market was primed for three twenty five basis point cuts this year. And we'll see if I could take a look right now to see if there's any more play on a 50. And there isn't. And there probably shouldn't be. I don't know that this will motivate Fed officials to do more but it will motivate them to do something. Those are my two takeaways Steve. Number one this sort of ratifies the idea that they should cut next week and that job growth has stalled and has slowed and looks even worse than they originally expected in the last few months have been have been weaker. And then the second is my question about the the process. So how how were we almost a million jobs short in terms of you know there have been questions lately about how this this process this data the president raised it. He fired the BLS chief. Does this feed into those concerns about about how the data was so off. I think it should. And I'll tell you why Sarah. Because when I look at the history of these as a percentage of payrolls actually they do a pretty good job. When you look at the revisions as a percent point one point two it's averaged about point three. This is point six. This is double the average. So and let me just see if I could find out the last couple of years. Yes it was point four in 2024. So the last couple of years have been quite a bit above average in terms of the amount of revision. What's happening here is we're getting jobless claim insurance data from the states. I don't know if the problem is at the state level or if it's at the federal level. Whatever it is there's something not going quite as well as it used to go in terms of the ability of the BLS to gather monthly data. Here's here's the process there which I'm sure you know but maybe not every viewer knows which is that we get we get it to be at the next month the 15th of the month of the 12th of the month. We get it once then we revise it again. Then we revise it a third time until the annual benchmarks come along. We revise it on a prior basis and revise it again. We keep counting it and keep counting it. But it looks like the counting as was evidence in that big June revision on the preliminary stuff is not as good as it was and it's not as good as it was even on a annual basis. So we seem to be having a problem here and something needs to change. I've often thought about the idea of can we do better getting better data from the states on a more consistent basis. Steve thanks for that important number. Maybe one of the most important of the day are Steve Leisman on the job growth revisions.

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