The U.S. economy added nearly a million fewer jobs in the year through March 2025 than previously reported, according to preliminary figures released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The revision, the largest on record, suggests job growth during that period was running at roughly half the pace initially believed.
The BLS said payrolls will likely be revised down by 911,000 jobs, or 0.6 percent. That reduces total employment gains for the 12 months ending in March to about 850,000, compared with the 1.8 million originally reported. On a seasonally adjusted basis, average monthly job growth drops from about 147,000 to just over 70,000.
The downward adjustment hits nearly every industry and most states. Wholesale and retail trade accounted for the largest share of the shortfall, followed by leisure and hospitality, professional and business services, and manufacturing. Information employment was revised down by more than 2 percent, the steepest cut in percentage terms.
A Weaker Inheritance
The revision recasts the economic backdrop at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. Far from inheriting a booming labor market, Trump stepped into office amid an economy that was already weaker than believed. What was described at the time as a historically strong job market now appears far less robust.
In June 2024, White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein told the New York Times that “it’s beyond question that this is one of the strongest labor markets that we’ve ever seen.” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in December that “the U.S. economy has just been remarkable… performing very, very well.” Both statements rested on payroll data that has now been sharply revised down.
At the time, analysts argued that voters were discounting plentiful jobs in favor of focusing on inflation. The new data suggests voters weren’t overlooking strength — they were detecting weakness obscured by inflated statistics.
Pressure on the Fed
The revision also highlights the risk that the Federal Reserve miscalibrated policy in late 2024. The central bank lowered interest rates three times between September and December, but has left them in place since Donald Trump took office. In recent months, job growth has slowed to a crawl and the revisions show that it was weaker even before Trump took office, meaning the Fed was already behind the curve. With unemployment rising to 4.3 percent in August, the highest in nearly four years, the case for further cuts is now even stronger.
A Pattern of Large Revisions
Tuesday’s announcement marks the second unusually large benchmark revision in a row. In February, the BLS lowered its estimate of job growth through March 2024 by nearly 600,000. The new revision, which will be finalized and incorporated into official statistics in February 2026, underscores that the earlier overstatement was not an anomaly but part of a pattern of inflated initial payroll figures. Some economists expect that final revisions will not be as large as the preliminary estimate, repeating the pattern from last year when the first estimate was for 818,000 fewer jobs.
The revisions have also intensified scrutiny of the Bureau of Labor Statistics itself. President Trump last month dismissed the agency’s Senate-confirmed commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, citing the repeated large revisions. He has nominated economist E.J. Antoni, a longtime critic of the bureau’s methods, to take her place.
The revision does not directly affect data after March 2025. But combined with recent weak monthly reports — just 22,000 jobs added in August — it paints a picture of a labor market that is faltering faster, and from a weaker starting point, than most forecasters assumed.
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