A chart comparing the previously released monthly change in jobs to revisions that show that jobs grew less in most months.
Cumulative change in
jobs since Feb. 2020
Cumulative change in
jobs since Feb. 2020
Job growth was weaker in 2023 and 2024 than initially reported, but the big annual revisions weren’t quite as bad as preliminary estimates had suggested.
The payroll numbers reported each month come from a survey of thousands of businesses and other employers. Once a year, the Labor Department revises those estimates to reconcile them with more accurate but less timely data from state unemployment insurance offices.
This year’s revision was unusually large. According to the updated data, employers added about 655,000 fewer jobs in 2023 and 2024 than previously estimated. It was the largest downward revision since 2009.
Still, the revision was smaller than expected: In August, the Labor Department released a preliminary estimate showing that the monthly surveys had overstated hiring by 818,000 jobs.
And while job growth was weaker than earlier estimates showed, the revisions did little to change the overall picture of a strong labor market. Employers added 2.6 million jobs in 2023 and two million in 2024. Over President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s four years in office, the economy added more than 16 million jobs, although much of that came during his first two years as businesses reopened from the pandemic.
While the big picture changed little, the new data did reveal some more significant shifts beneath the surface. Job growth was faster in health care and government than previous reports showed, which is notable because those sectors already accounted for a disproportionate share of recent gains. Growth in retail work and temporary help services was revised sharply lower.
The new numbers also help resolve a mystery: The survey of employers had shown significantly stronger job gains in recent years than an alternative measure of employment based on a survey of households. But the combination of the downward revision to growth in the employer survey and a big upward adjustment to employment in the household survey — which was tied to new Census Bureau population estimates — largely closed the gap between the two measures.
