The jobs picture took another blow this morning.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) revealed a huge downward adjustment to the job growth that was reported over the March 2024 to March 2025 period.
In this scheduled annual revision 911,000 jobs were erased from the records.
If we distribute that equally across the already twice revised job growth data for the twelve months through March of this year, we get the chart below …
From this chart, we can see the initially reported nonfarm payroll series of data in blue (and the 12-month average). And after all revisions (including this morning's adjustment), we get the red line (and the adjusted 12-month average).
In short, the initial payroll numbers were overstated by an average of 113,000 jobs a month.
Worse, if we look back at this report from last year, it was also a huge downward revision (the deepest since 2009) that revealed jobs were overstated by 100,000 a month.
That means, from March 2023 to March 2025, the BLS initially presented data to key decision makers in our economy that was overstated by 2.5 million jobs.
