No one likes it when a teacher pulls out a red pen. Revisions are rarely fun. And with recent revisions to jobs numbers, we have a feeling the Bureau of Labor Statistics isn’t a fan of the red pen either.
The US economy added jobs at a much slower clip than initially reported in 2024 and early 2025, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday, fueling concerns that the once seemingly sturdy job market has harbored deeper cracks than we previously realized.
Annual revisions to payroll data demonstrated a 911,000 drop from previous estimates. That’s a decrease of over 50% from the 1.79 million total jobs the BLS previously reported.
The leisure and hospitality sector was especially hard-hit by the revisions, subtracting 176,000 jobs from initial estimates. Professional and business services, as well as retail, were also revised down significantly. Ultimately, most sectors, with the exception of transportation, warehousing, and utilities, were downwardly revised.
The corrections arrive as part of the BLS’s annual benchmark review of jobs numbers. The BLS historically updates the figures using more comprehensive data from state unemployment tax filings, which take longer than the business surveys it initially uses for jobs numbers.
A full revision, which economists expect to be less negative, will arrive in February, per the Wall Street Journal. But if the corrections hold, they would mark the largest annual revision to jobs data to date, according to CNN.
You hate to see that red pen coming.
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