The US added 911,000 fewer jobs than first estimated for the year to March 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced on Tuesday, highlighting recent concerns about the health of the labor market.
The revisions are 50% higher than last year’s adjustment and were on the higher end of Wall Street estimates between 600,000 and 1 million.
The revision comes after a lackluster August jobs report, with only 22,000 jobs added in the US. That report too contained revisions and noted that 13,000 jobs were lost for the month of June 2025, the first negative jobs report survey since December 2020. The unemployment rate increased to 4.3%, the highest rate since 2021.
Donald Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of labor statistics, after a weak July job’s report that he claimed – without evidence – was “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad”.
But while these revisions to the jobs data are large, they are not unusual. During periods of economic change – such as the introduction of tariffs and the arrival of AI in the workplace – economists note businesses often take longer to reply to the BLS’s surveys, leading to gaps in their data.
“Annual revisions incorporate slow, administrative (non-survey) data that helps keep monthly estimates representative of broad labor-market trends,” stated Friends of Bureau of Labor Statistics in an FAQ on job statistics from the bureau.
The largest revisions were in leisure and hospitality (down 176,000), professional and business services (down 158,000) and retail trade (down 126,200). Government jobs were adjusted down by 31,000 jobs. The numbers released will face further revisions when BLS releases final benchmark figure in February 2026.
“These numbers are likely to anger President Trump and the White House who incorrectly view revised data as political manipulation,” wrote Elise Gould and Ben Zipperer, economists at the Economic Policy Institute, in a post on the report.
“Trump has already lashed out at BLS, including firing the agency’s commissioner because a jobs report showed a rapidly weakening labor market. But these BLS data revisions are not corrections of mistakes. Revisions are part of the regular, transparent process to update employment counts with the most comprehensive data possible.”
