Economy

mahatmakanejeeves

(68,864 posts) Wed Feb 11, 2026, 04:46 PM Wednesday

Current Employment Statistics monthly revisions and annual benchmarking explained, February 2025

Reposted by Erika McEntarfer
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Doug Webber
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Current Employment Statistics monthly revisions and annual benchmarking explained, February 2025
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9:42 PM · Feb 9, 2026

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Current Employment Statistics monthly revisions and annual benchmarking explained, February 2025 (Original Post) mahatmakanejeeves Wednesday OP

MaddowBlog-New report shows 2025 was even worse for U.S. job market than we thought LetMyPeopleVote Wednesday #1

Here's the revisions: the before and after and the differences progree 13 hrs ago #2

LetMyPeopleVote

(177,107 posts)

1. MaddowBlog-New report shows 2025 was even worse for U.S. job market than we thought

Reply to mahatmakanejeeves (Original post)

Wed Feb 11, 2026, 07:45 PM

Wednesday

A question for the White House: If Trump has created the greatest economy in history, why did job growth slow to a 16-year low after he returned to power?

We thought 2025 was a bad year for the U.S. job market. We now know it was far worse than we feared.

The question for the White House is simple: If Trump has created the greatest economy in history, why did job growth collapse after he returned to power?
www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...
— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2026-02-11T14:00:53.622Z

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/new-report-shows-2025-was-even-worse-for-u-s-job-market-than-we-thought

Expectations heading into this week showed projections of about 55,000 new jobs being created in the United States in January. As it turns out, according to the new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the totals exceeded those expectations. CNBC News reported:

Job growth was stronger than expected to start 2026, providing some relief to concerns about the state of the U.S. labor market.

Nonfarm payrolls increased by 130,000 for January, compared to the downwardly revised growth of 48,000 in December, and above the Dow Jones consensus estimate for 55,000, according to seasonally adjusted figures the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Wednesday.

The unemployment rate edged lower to 4.3%.

....But while the new report wasn’t a disaster, it’s only a small part of a larger picture: The February report from the BLS is unique because it includes revised data from the entire previous calendar year.

And on this front, the new data is quite brutal.

Previous estimates showed that the U.S. economy generated 584,000 jobs in the first year of Donald Trump’s second term, which was deeply discouraging. In fact, if we exclude years in which the economy fell into recession, the preliminary data showed that 2025 was the worst year for U.S. job growth since 2003.

Now, however, the picture is far worse: The newly revised, final data shows that the U.S. economy added only 181,000 jobs in 2025......

In other words, what would ordinarily be seen as a good month for job growth represented the entirety of the year. Indeed, in the final month of Joe Biden’s presidency, the economy created 237,000 jobs, more than entirety of the year that followed.

What’s more, we now know that in four months last year, the U.S. economy actually lost jobs — the first time this has happened since the Great Recession.

This week, the president peddled a familiar boast, insisting that he’s responsible for creating “the greatest economy, actually, ever in history.”

That was bonkers for a variety of reasons, but the new jobs data makes the claim look even worse. Indeed, the question for Trump and his White House team is simple: If Trump has created the greatest economy in history, why did American job growth slow to a 16-year low after he returned to power?

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progree

(12,822 posts)

2. Here's the revisions: the before and after and the differences

Reply to mahatmakanejeeves (Original post)

Thu Feb 12, 2026, 06:02 PM

13 hrs ago

Last edited Thu Feb 12, 2026, 10:40 PM - Edit history (1)

Here's how the payroll jobs numbers looked the last time (I scraped this Thursday night Feb 10) before the new Feb 11 report

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001?output_view=net_1mth
Non-farm payroll jobs, monthly changes in thousands

Year Jan Feb Mar etc. etc.
2022] 225 869 471 305 241 461 696 237 227 400 297 126
2023] 444 306 85 216 227 257 148 157 158 186 141 269
2024] 119 222 246 118 193 87 88 71 240 44 261 323
2025] 111 102 120 158 19 -13 72 -26 108 -173 56 50

Here's how it looks now:

(in thousands)
Year Jan Feb Mar etc. etc.
2022] 190 819 490 308 301 434 714 290 220 357 303 100
2023] 434 290 68 241 280 225 163 218 156 159 127 154
2024] 175 206 228 64 78 87 53 9 155 33 134 237
2025] -48 42 67 108 13 -20 64 -70 76 -140 41 48
and January 2026 is 130

Differences, in thousands

Year Jan Feb Mar etc. etc.
2022] -35 -50 19 3 60 -27 18 53 -7 -43 6 -26
2023] -10 -16 -17 25 53 -32 15 61 -2 -27 -14 -115
2024] 56 -16 -18 -54 -115 0 -35 -62 -85 -11 -127 -86
2025] -159 -60 -53 -50 -6 -7 -8 -44 -32 33 -15 -2

Annual Totals, in thousands

Year Before After Difference
2022] 4555 4526 -29
2023] 2594 2515 -79
2024] 2012 1459 -553
2025] 584 181 -403

2025 comes out to an average of 15k jobs/month. If you remove January, it is 21k/month. A barely above-the-waterline record.

(Biden was president for most of January, and more importantly the Establishment Survey that produces the job numbers was conducted in the January 12-16 period, before the inauguration.)

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