September 9, 2025

The annual revision of the US jobs numbers came with a surprise:

The American jobs market has been running in a much lower gear than previously thought, according to a preliminary report released Tuesday.

The US economy added about 911,000 fewer jobs than initially estimated for the year ending in March, the Bureau of Labor Statistics report suggests. If this were to hold – the final annual benchmark revision will be reported in February 2026 – it would be the largest annual revision to US jobs data on record.

Tuesday’s revisions release is the first step in BLS’ annual benchmark review of jobs data, a process that has taken place in some shape or form going back 90 years.
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The preliminary benchmark revision of -911,000 came in on the high end of economists’ estimates and accounts for about a 0.6% share of overall employment. The annual benchmark revisions during the past 10 years had an absolute average of 0.2% of total nonfarm employment, BLS data shows.

If spread out through the year ended in March, the revision would lower the average monthly job gains by nearly 76,000 positions between April 2024 and March 2025. As it stands now, job growth during that period was 146,500 per month.

If finalized, this downward revision would bring that to about 70,500 per month, BLS data shows.
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Economists said Tuesday that the massive revision was probably attributable in part to the pandemic throwing out of whack the so-called birth-death model, a longstanding statistical tool that’s used to measure business and job creation.

Prior to Tuesday’s release, economists predicted that a large downward revision was likely due to three primary factors: weaker-than-inferred job creation at new firms; sampling errors resulting from declining survey response rates; and, adjustments for asylum-seekers and other undocumented workers.

I haven’t seen any political reaction to this; perhaps because it’s too much of a hot potato!