The labour market has produced far fewer jobs than previously thought, according to a report by the Labor Department on Tuesday, which added to concerns about both the health of the economy and the status of data collection.
According to a preliminary report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the annual revision of non-farm pay data for the year prior to March 2025 showed a 911,000 decrease from the initial estimate. The total revision was the high end of Wall Street’s expectations, ranging from around 600,000 to 1 million people.
The revision was more than 50% higher than last year’s adjustment, and was the largest on record, dating back to 2002. It suggests that each month there is an average of 76,000 employment growth rates than originally reported.
Numbers adjusted from quarterly census data and reflect updates on business openings and closures add to evidence that employment situations in the United States are weakening.
Most of the reports came before President Donald Trump took office. It shows that his work photo is getting worse before he collects tariffs on his US trading partners.
“The revision of BLS’s preliminary benchmarks to non-farm pay salaries shows a much weaker labor market than previously estimated for most of 2024 and early 2025 and most of early 2025.” “Importantly, slower job creation means that income growth was on a softer footing, even before the recent rise in policy uncertainty and economic slowdowns we saw since the spring.
Tuesday’s revision doesn’t reflect current conditions in itself, as they’ll be back for a year and a half. However, data from recent months also point to the soft labor market. In the summer months of June, July and August, average salary growth was just 29,000 a month, below break levels to stabilize unemployment.
The biggest markdowns were provided in leisure and hospitality (-176,000), professional and business services (-158,000), and retail (-126,200). Transport, warehouse and utility benefits were small, but most sectors saw a downward revision. Almost all revisions were limited to the private sector. Government work has adjusted 31,000.
The stocks reacted little to the release, but the Treasury Department brought about the elimination of the losses and went up.
In addition to economic concerns, the revision brings additional heat to the BLS being fired from the White House due to data collection methods and results.
Following a weak employment report in July, featuring a major downward revision, President Donald Trump fired then-BLS commissioner Erica Mantelfer and announced her successor, Heritage Foundation economist Egi Antoni. However, salaries in August were actually lower than in July, and featured a revision that reduced the total in June to a loss of 13,000 jobs. This is the first negative total since December 2020.
“Today, the BLS has announced the biggest downward revision on record, proving that President Trump is right. Biden’s economy is a disaster, and BLS is broken,” White House spokesman Caroline Leavitt said in a statement. “This is exactly why new leadership is needed to restore confidence and trust in BLS data on behalf of financial markets, businesses, policymakers, and families who rely on this data to make key decisions.”
Benchmark revisions differ from monthly adjustments in that they are much more comprehensive.
If monthly movements come from additional survey data derived from BLS, the annual revision comes from more comprehensive information from the quarterly census of employment and wages, and tax data that provides a complete repetition of the data rather than incremental course revisions in monthly reports.
Additionally, the figures released on Tuesday will face further revisions once BLS releases its final benchmark figures in February 2026.
In the previous benchmark revisions 12 months before March 2024, the initial total was 818,000 fewer, and later adjusted in February 2025 to 598,000, the largest downward movement since 2009.
The revised share of the 171 million labor force is 0.6%. However, the political and economic impacts can be substantial.
Additional indications of weakness in the labour market add to the incident that Trump is seeking interest rate cuts for the Federal Reserve.
A White House statement added that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell “officially exhausted excuses and now we have to cut our fees.”
