Friday's Jobs Report Will Be Confusing. Here's How to Make Sense of It.

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Friday’s Jobs Report Will Be Confusing. Here’s How to Make Sense of It.

The Labor Department’s January survey will include revisions making data for previous months look stronger in some cases and weaker in others.


Friday’s jobs report will be complicated by major revisions in employment data. Graham Dickie/The New York Times

By Ben Casselman
Feb. 6, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET

The Labor Department’s latest monthly report on hiring and unemployment will include revisions for previous months that should give a more accurate picture of the U.S. job market — but that could also sow confusion.

When the data is released on Friday, one major measure of employment will be revised up. Another will be revised down. Some historical numbers will be revised, but others won’t. And the updates, though part of a routine process, will be taking place in a political environment where both sides have at times expressed skepticism of government economic statistics. ... “There is going to be a massive amount of confusion,” said Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project, an economic policy arm of the Brookings Institution.

Here is what economists say you will need to know about the revisions to make sense of the numbers.

The revisions are part of a longstanding annual process.

The monthly job figures are based on two surveys, one of employers and one of households. Those surveys are generally reliable — they involve a number of interviews far larger than a presidential election poll, for example — but they aren’t perfect. And so, once a year, the government reconciles the numbers with less timely but more reliable data from other sources. Similar processes are in place for revising other government statistics, like gross domestic product and personal income.

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Recent job growth will be revised down.

In August, the Labor Department released preliminary data, based on records from state unemployment insurance offices, showing that employers added roughly 818,000 fewer jobs in 2023 and early 2024 than initially reported. On Friday, the department will release an updated version of those figures and incorporate them into the official jobs data. ... The final revision, which will affect job totals for every month since March 2023, could be larger or smaller than the preliminary estimate. But it will almost certainly be the largest in recent years, possibly the biggest downward adjustment since 2009. That will make job growth during the Biden administration look weaker than previously reported.

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Ben Casselman writes about economics with a particular focus on stories involving data. He has covered the economy for nearly 20 years, and his recent work has focused on how trends in labor, politics, technology and demographics have shaped the way we live and work. More about Ben Casselman