Witness negative revisions 77 percent of the time, with more coming.
Job Revision Notes
- The chart measures the difference between the initial report and the most recent revision.
- Since January 2023, jobs revisions were negative 24 out of 31 times, 77 percent of the time.
- There is no revision to August 2025 data. The July 2025 positive revision is suspect.
- For 2025, revisions total -482,000. That’s an average negative revision of ~69,000 per month including the positive 6,000 revision in July.
BLS Nonfarm Payroll Changes as Released and Revised
Nonfarm payroll growth was only 22,000 in August.
Any significant negative revision would turn August job growth negative.
June job growth is -13,000. May could easily turn negative as well.
QCEW Report Shows Overstatement of Jobs
On June 16, I commented QCEW Report Shows Overstatement of Jobs by the BLS is Increasing
The discrepancy between QCEW and the BLS jobs report is rising.
We will have a QCEW update next week to review. It will be for the first quarter of 2025.
Related Posts
September 4, 2025: Year-Over-Year Small Business Employment Growth Barely Above Zero
ADP reports the total YOY small business growth as +19,000.
The Unemployment Level Is Now Greater than Job Openings
On September 3, I noted The Unemployment Level Is Now Greater than Job Openings
For the first time since the pandemic unemployment is above openings.
The nonfarm payroll response rate is 42.6 percent with the same issues as with JOLTS
September 5, 2025: Jobs Report Misery: Only 22,000 Gain in August, June Revised to -13,000
August was a bad month for job seekers. Here are the grim details.
Mike, Sorry if mentioned below and from another source but is it accurate that buried in the report that the number of full time jobs dropped by 357,000 while the number of part time jobs increased 597,000 ?
That right?
this is how we impress the world that we are the alpha-est…
UFC cage match on the south lawn of the WH
Weigh-ins at the Lincoln Memorial
Fighters walk out from the Oval office
That’ll scare Putin and Xi
Feel diminished yet??
Embarrassed. I am embarrassed.
Xi is not scared. Apparently the Chinese are taking organ harvesting to the next level.
Xi looks like he is growing a fetus inside…………………………………
In all seriousness I hope he is ok, at least health wise
And that fact supports the ouster of McEntarfer. I have not heard one thing from this lady about needing to reform how the BLS collects, analyzes & reports data. Am I happy with how TACO dismissed her? No, but I’m fine with her ouster. If the course correction is to happen, you need someone new in there forcing the needed changes. Now whether or not TACO’s guy will get this done is far from certain. But this much is certain. Almost everything about the how the US government operates needs to be updated in pretty big ways.
Because she could have changed how data is collected singlehandedly? I’m sure Trump’s lackey will really get to the bottom of the numbers! Just as soon as you come out of la la land, that is.
The point Creamer is that it wasn’t even on her radar. If it was, she would have immediately come out & said, “This is what we’ve been doing the last 6-12 months to start doing things differently.”
But she didn’t, because again they were NOT making any plans to change their processes. They were fat, dumb & happy with the status quo. That can pretty much sums up what happened during Joe Biden’s four years. The Federal workforce grew, & grew, & grew and virtually NOBODY has been trying to make the needed changes as to how the government operates & spend my tax dollars.
Well, hell, I’m smart enough to realize that if you cut enough people, then those who are left are going to have to work their asses off to get the same job done. And it’s only then that they’ll start looking around for the better mouse trap.
As for the numbers, I think the 2nd & 3rd revisions are probably good numbers. Hopefully, TACO’s “lackey” will get the BLS to produce 1st time numbers that everyone feels are credible & we mostly eliminate these wild gyrations that happen over the next quarter correct their previous quarter’s numbers.
THAT’S THE GOAL. AND THE GOAL SHOULD BE TO MAKE THAT KIND CHANGE ACROSS THE ENTIRE GOVERNMENT & THAT’S NOT SOMETHING COMRADE KAMALA WAS GOING TO DO!!!
This is false.
Dumb comments like yours should be banned. If you are going to make an accusation, then back it up with more than a blanket statement.
You neglected to mention that the BLS, in and of itself, probably cannot change the processes it uses to collect and report data. Many, many businesses depend on that data to some degree and incorporate into their own reports and business decisions. Any change would require notification and would get significant kickback.
To radically change most anything in government, especially economic statistics, takes years of analysis, horse trading, arguing, multiple checkoff’s, trial runs, etc., etc.
Also many want change but no one is specifying exactly what it is that needs changing or how they might change whatever they want to change.
This is all to commonplace in a world where everyone finds it easy to say “we need to do something now, wave that magic wand” but no one can agree on what or how. We don’t live in a Starship Enterprise world where Captain Picard says “Make it so”.
As I stated above, I believe the easiest first step to take is to simply report the statistics on a rolling 3 month average as a starting point. This minimizes impact, allows updated data to be incorporated, smoothing the resultant numbers, while more drastic changes are pondered.
At a meta level, there’s a trick to maintain credibility while continuing to lie. Lie now and “revise” or ”correct the record” later.
A statistics publisher can lie about current statistics and simultaneously revise prior months. With this simple distortion, they create an initial impression the stat improves every period even while nothing changes at all over multiple periods.
A newspaper can print lies about, say, WMD or jab safety/efficacy and “correct the record” later, to suggest they’re always interested in truth and any deviations therefrom were honest mistakes.
Sorry for being pedantic.
Which is why economic statistics should be averaged over 3-4 months, which will remove most of the noise of revisions due to data collection issues.
But stakeholders including media dn traders don’t want this. Then they would lose the month to month volatility that drives their businesses.
I may be wrong on this, but the way to interpret the negative payroll revisions seems to me to be straightforward: Trump’s negative supply shocks to the economy (high tariff levels and tariff uncertainty, sudden stop to net immigration) mostly affect negatively SMEs. At he same time, large compagnie are coping well with the Trump shocks because they have pricing power, can easily switch supply chains, and a visit to the Oval Office or Mar-a-Lago can work wonders for their profit situation (see also the S&P500 relative to the Russel2000 since Trump took office). Now, large companies report their payrolls early, while SMEs report with delays. As a consequence, the first payroll estimates are dominated by large companies that keep doing relatively well, while the bad news (SMEs suffering) comes during the next months, triggering the negative revisions in the payroll data.
Thank you for your analysis.
I would also find if helpful if you could please explain the 818,000 job “revision” from April 2023 to March 2024?
And it won’t be necessary to mention the name Biden 3 times nor his 2 Delaware homes. I can do without that please.
Thank you.
EU fined google $3.45 billion and now Trump is throwing his usual hissy fit and planning on destroying more jobs with tariffs.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/05/google-slapped-by-eu-with-3point45-billion-antitrust-fine.html
Looks like the Trumptanic is sailing into a global depression. Only hope is the ship runs out of steam in 1233 days.
I think he’ll be dead by the end of the year.
I bet the D’s start another impeachment after winning midterms, drag it out for another two to milk it, and maybe Trump’s health fails him in the meantime.
Or…ww3 escalates further.
Vance is laying low, waiting….
… on his favorite couch.
The EU uses fines for American tech firms like Google as a cash cow to fund much of their foolishness.
I keep saying that AI is going to eat away at job growth and the labor participation rate is going to fall sharply over the next few years.
In the recent article below, Salesforce CEO Benioff says Ai growth in its customer service function has cut 4k jobs in the last year and mentions that some number of these have been redeployed to sales, although he doesn’t mention how many of the 4k were actually given a new role.
But if everyone gets laid off, who’s going to pay FICA and fund social security and medicare? We can only hope both programs are eliminated entirely to save America.
Screw that…I’ve been paying into social security my whole damn life, and I want some of that money back.
Best the government can do is $0.10 on the dollar…. take it or leave it?
It’s what the people voted for so you reap what you sow.
?
The estimate is SS will only be able to pay 81% of its benefits come 2034. And plenty of changes on SS coming to hopefully get it back to 100%
What does that have to do with Trump? That is because of a myriad of circumstances that has nothing to do with Trump.
Shutting down the economy and have millions of people on unemployment and not paying into SS on both employee & employer side pushed that up another year as well.
Wait don’t tell me , we really are going to shut the government down this time? like a fucking annual threat now.
As someone I remember says. ” Come on man”
As I have said repeatedly, everything will be free in the future. All your money will be of not value when anyone can have anything they want simply by asking for it.
Trump tells the BLS to start revising down all numbers that indicate any economic strength. He gets his zero percent rates, and then watch the numbers start to slowly rise …
Which is something an independent FED is supposed to countercheck. Will Powell capitulate to Trump’s wants?
All dictators get what they want.
With a potential recession looming over the world, people aren’t jumping ships for new jobs as much as they used to. The truth is, we’re really overdue for a cut in GNP. Traditionally, the recession lasts long enough for adjustments to be made to the fundamental economy.
Technological improvements are still being absorbed into the mainstream, and there’s jobs in these fields. Even during a recession the technocrats reign supreme. The economy, girded against a Depression by active government involvement, may never again sink as low — in terms of jobs lost — as it did in 1929.
With the hundredth-year anniversary of that economic disaster fast approaching, it behooves us to be grateful that governments have learned the Keynesian lesson of pump-priming, using deficit spending to enhance the general jobs picture. It works. We’ve come a long way from Hoover Towns.
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dark . sport. blog Is my website — Come visit me there for more of my writings!
Quit plugging your blog already.
Nothing says good blog like plugging it in the comments of a different blog lol
So; just how bad is the situation? How much longer can it go on this way?
“Something will continue until it stops”
To what do you attribute the continual revisions, MISH?
Incompetence or intention. And it’s not just that jobs have been revised lower for all those months, but the magnitude of the corrections.
Intention or breakout would be closer to even.