The Economy Just Lost Nearly A Million Jobs, On Paper

It turns out the job market was weaker than previously thought. 

The U.S. economy added 911,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March 2025 than previously reported, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday in a preliminary annual revision to its job creation data. Although the revision only reduces the estimated size of the U.S. workforce by 0.6%, it means the economy added only about half as many jobs over that time period as the bureau said in its monthly job market reports.

While this routine revision doesn’t reflect the current labor market conditions, the downward shift could amplify fears that the job market is faltering.

Jobs growth is weakening under the weight of President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the Federal Reserve’s high interest rates. It may put pressure on the Fed to cut its key interest rate to lower borrowing costs and bolster the job market.

“Labor market momentum is being lost from an even weaker position than originally thought, reinforcing expectations of meaningful interest rate cuts,” James Knightley, chief international economist at ING, wrote in a commentary.

The revision is part of a routine process for the BLS that has come under scrutiny in the Trump era. The president has criticized the bureau for the accuracy of its data, and last month fired the bureau’s commissioner after a large downward revision to job creation statistics.

The bureau revises its reports on the job market several times as it receives more comprehensive information about hiring and firing. The bureau’s initial monthly reports come out in the early days of the following month and are based on surveys of 161,000 businesses.

Those initial reports are revised twice in subsequent months as businesses turn in surveys late. Then, every year, the bureau revises the data yet again to incorporate information from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which covers 95% of all workers.

The QCEW revisions are due to be finalized in September, and many economists expect the final downward revision to be less severe than the preliminary estimate reported Tuesday.

Data Can Be Quick Or Accurate, Pick One

The revision underscores one of the compromises that government statistical agencies make when they report important economic trends like job growth and inflation every month: numbers reported earlier will always be less accurate.

Getting data sooner, however, is crucial for decision-makers, including policymakers at the Federal Reserve, who meet regularly to set the central bank’s key interest rate to keep inflation under control and employment high.

“There is a tradeoff between precision and timeliness when it comes to many economic datasets,” Elizabeth Renter, senior economist at NerdWallet, wrote in a commentary. “In the case of the employment figures, we accept rough estimates in order to get frequent, monthly data. This frequent data leads to more effective monetary policy, among other things.”

Tuesday’s downward revision paints a clearer picture of the labor market’s health but says nothing about how President Donald Trump’s economic policies have affected job growth: Trump was only in office at the very end of the period covered by the revisions, and his controversial import taxes had only just begun to be implemented.

The final revisions in February could take a feather out of the cap of former President Joe Biden if they show that the economy actually lost jobs in any month during his presidency: as it stands, he is the only U.S. president to have ever presided over an unbroken streak of monthly job growth.