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

[Wiz Imp]

32. Benchmark jobs data will be released with the next monthly release at the beginning of February.

We already know that March 2025 data will be revised downward by a likely significant amount (see attached press release from September). The monthly movements from the survey data will likely not change by a lot (due to the way the revised data is calculated) but I'd be shocked if the benchmark data don't show the gains under Trump to be even smaller than the pitifully small gains originally estimated/reported.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/prebmk.nr0.htm

The preliminary estimate of the Current Employment Statistics (CES) national benchmark revision to total nonfarm employment for March 2025 is -911,000 (-0.6 percent), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The annual benchmark revisions over the last 10 years have an absolute average of 0.2 percent of total nonfarm employment. In accordance with usual practice, the final benchmark revision will be issued in February 2026 with the publication of the January 2026 Employment Situation news release.

Each year, CES employment estimates are benchmarked to comprehensive counts of employment from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW). These counts are derived primarily from state unemployment insurance (UI) tax records that nearly all employers are required to file with state workforce agencies.

The preliminary benchmark revision reflects the difference between two independently derived employment counts, each subject to their own sources of error. It serves as a preliminary measure of the total error in CES employment estimates from March 2024 to March 2025. Preliminary research, which is not comprehensive and is subject to updates in QCEW data, indicates that the primary contributors to the overestimation of employment growth are likely the result of two sources—response error and nonresponse error. First, businesses reported less employment to the QCEW than they reported to the CES survey (response error). Second, businesses who were selected for the CES survey but did not respond reported less employment to the QCEW than those businesses who did respond to
the CES survey (nonresponse error). Estimates of other errors, such as the forecast error from the net birth-death model, are not available at this time. Information on how the net birth-death forecasts have reduced benchmark revisions historically are available on the CES Birth-Death Model Frequently Asked Questions page in question 10, ww.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesbdqa.htm.

Please note, the -911,000 revision is only to the MArch 2025 level. Other months are then recalculated off of that. Also note, that was just a prelimary estimate. The final revision could be larger or smaller. The 2024 benchmark revision ended up at -589,000 while the prelimnary estimated revision was -818,000.

Finally, be aware that assuming March 2025 is revised downward significantly, it will impact Biden's jobs record more than Trump's (because it only covers the first 2 months of Trump's administration). However, even in a worst case revision scenario, Biden's job creation numbers will remain significantly above Trump's and Trump's numbers will almost certainly be significantly worse than they have been so far.