The count of payroll jobs is likely to be 911,000 lower than previously thought after revisions are made, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday.
The agency, which has been under fire from President Donald Trump for downward jobs revisions, gave notice of the lower total number in the form of a preliminary “benchmark” revision to the payroll jobs estimate, part of a routine update process. The final revised number will be made public in February.
The announcement adds to evidence that the labor market is weaker than recent official numbers have indicated. It applies to job growth from March 2024 to March 2025, meaning the revisions only cover the first two months of Trump’s second term. The revisions would mean that job growth during that time averaged 71,000 a month, rather than 147,000.
“That’s a much weaker portrait of the job market than initially thought,” Sal Guatieri, an economist for BMO Capital Markets Economics, wrote in a note on the release. “While the revision doesn’t say much about what has happened since March, it suggests the labour market had less momentum heading into the trade war.”
The agency said that private-sector employment was lower than estimated by 880,000 in March, or 0.7% of the total. Government employment was lower by 31,000, or 0.6%.
The overall 0.6% revision was massive, by historical standards. Typically, the benchmark revision only changes the job count by 0.2%.
Although a large downward revision was expected, analysts anticipated that the bad news might trigger a negative reaction from Trump, who in August fired the BLS commissioner after the release of a monthly jobs report that showed negative revisions to previous months’ gains.
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, whose agency includes the BLS, blasted the BLS following Tuesday’s report, saying that it “gives the American people even more reason to doubt the integrity of data being published by BLS.”
“Leaders at the bureau failed to improve their practices during the Biden administration, utilizing outdated methods that rendered a once reliable system completely ineffective and calling into question the motivation behind their inaction,” she said.
The preliminary revision announced Tuesday is different from the revisions to the previous two months’ jobs numbers that are included in every monthly jobs report.
Instead, it is part of an annual process for adjusting the estimates of payroll jobs, which are based on the monthly survey of establishments. The BLS rebenchmarks those numbers to a comprehensive count of jobs from the BLS’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which is a quarterly assessment of employment and wages reported by employers, covering more than 95% of U.S. jobs.
Recent years have seen unusually large revisions because of several factors that have made it more difficult to get accurate numbers.
THERE ARE MORE JOBLESS AMERICANS THAN JOB OPENINGS: BLS
One is falling response rates, which worsened over the course of years and then rapidly fell following the pandemic.
The other is the major distortions created by the massive influx of illegal immigrants during President Joe Biden’s tenure. Illegal immigration employment, for example, might show up in the survey of establishments, but not in the QCEW.
The BLS said Tuesday that one source of error was businesses overstating job growth in the monthly establishment survey. Another was that businesses who did not response to the monthly survey were more likely to have reported less job growth when in the QCEW.
