April 2024 – March 2025 Benchmark Revision of Non-Payroll Employment Clarifies Picture Further – Currency Thoughts
April 2024 – March 2025 Benchmark Revision of Non-Payroll Employment Clarifies Picture Further
September 10, 2025
It was noted in a previous post last Friday that the 27 thousand change in non-farm payroll jobs during the middle third of 2025 was down from 123K in the first third of the year and 218K in the last third of 2024. Investors have now learned the additional fact that the previously estimated 1.758 million gain in jobs during the year through March 2025 was in fact overstated by 911K. That means that only 847K net new jobs had been created in that period. It is not known how the 911 over-estimate were distributed by month over that period, but it works out to an average 76K per month.
Assuming for simplicity that the distribution was in fact an even 76K in each and every one of those dozen months, the new triannual sequence of monthly jobs growth from the start of 2024 averages out to 157K in the first third of last year, 34K in the middle third of 2024, 142K in the final third of 2024, 66K in the first third of 2025 and 27K for the last four reported months through August. Before the benchmark revision had been revealed, the succession had appeared to have unfolded as 176K per month in January-April 2024, 110K in the middle third of the year, 218K in the final third, 123K in the first third of 2025 and 27K in the middle third. For individual months in 2025, the sequence of job changes assuming that those in January-March were each 76K less than understood before yesterday’s report works out to having been +35K in January, +26K in February, +44K in March, +158K in April, +19 in May, -13 in June, +79 in July and +22K last month.
Since the April 2023 – March 2024 benchmark revisions also reduced the survey-based initial estimate to a significant extent, there may in fact by a systematic tendency that biases the initial reports upward, and there’s no reason if that is so to believe that this year’s April -August numbers might also embody the same distortion. As the above numbers for the first eight months of this year show, only April and July are large enough to absorb new working age additions to the labor force. This suggests that the unemployment plus underemployment rate that climbed from 7.7% in June to 7.9% in July and a 46-month high of 8.1% last month will probably climb even higher during the final third of this year.
Copyright 2025, Larry Greenberg. All rights reserved. No secondary distribution without express permission.
Tags: Comment on yesterday’s U.S. benchmark jobs revision report
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