U.S. payrolls rose 50,000 in December, less than expected; unemployment rate falls to 4.4%

[progree]

29. Yes. The St. Louis Fed estimates only a net 57k jobs/month (+/- 25k) need to be created, down from the old 150k number

Lower Immigration Projections Mean Lower Breakeven Employment Growth Estimates, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 8/28/25
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/aug/lower-immigration-projections-mean-lower-breakeven-employment-growth

In April this year, St. Louis Fed economist Victoria Gregory and I provided an estimate for breakeven employment growth—the number of jobs the economy needs to add each month to keep the unemployment rate steady. Using Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections from January, we estimated that the U.S. economy needed to add more than 150,000 jobs per month to maintain a stable unemployment rate.1

Since then, new immigration projections have dramatically changed the picture. The bottom line: With much lower expected immigration for 2025, I now estimate breakeven employment growth has fallen to a range between 32,000 and 82,000 jobs per month. ((that's 57k +/- 25k -progree))

As for today's report of 50k net new payroll jobs, while unemployment rate ticked down 0.1 percentage points, 3 reasons:

1./ The above


2./ The 2 numbers come from different surveys -- the 50k number comes from the Establishment Survey, while the unemployment rate and labor force participation rate come from the Household Survey. The payroll jobs number sampling error: +/- 136,000 at 90% confidence interval And the unemployed numbers are +/- 300,000 (and +/- 0.2% for the unemployment rate).
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.tn.htm
Note, this is just the sampling error. There are other errors besides sampling error.

Correspondingly, again based on sampling error alone, there is a 50% chance that it is within +/- 55,800, and a 50% chance that it is outside that. So, for example for a reported job gain of 100,000, there is a 50% chance that it is between 44,200 and 155,800, and a 50% chance that it is outside that range based on sampling error alone. Note there are errors other than sampling error that add to the uncertainty


3./ As BRDS said, the labor force participation rate is a big factor in changing the unemployment rate. The labor force fell by 46k in December.
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11000000?output_view=net_1mth