The US added 911,000 fewer jobs than earlier thought in the year to March, according to new official statistics that suggest the labour market in the world’s biggest economy is weaker than earlier data showed.
The latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show national employment in the 12 months to March 2025 was far below levels implied by its closely watched monthly jobs reports and suggest the labour market had begun to slow in the latter period of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Tuesday’s revision roughly halves the 1.8 million job growth figure the agency had previously estimated for the period from March 2024 to March 2025, with monthly hiring averaging 75,000 positions less than thought.
The report will be a boost to President Donald Trump, who has argued that his aggressive tariff and immigration policies were not to blame for recent signs of weakness in the labour market.
The bureau’s monthly numbers, which are closely watched by investors and Wall Street traders, are based on regular surveys of businesses while the annual data released on Tuesday is collated based on a far more comprehensive state unemployment tax data submitted by employers.
The agency will publish a final estimate of employment growth over the period in February 2026 after it reviews additional reports from companies.
While a revision to the initial survey data is a regular part of the process for refining labour market statistics, the latest downgrade is far greater than usual and will add fuel to the debate over the quality of the agency’s monthly employment reports.
Omair Sharif, an economist at Inflation Insights, said the revision was “worse than any figure, preliminary or final, seen since at least 2000”.
Samuel Tombs, chief US economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, described the change as “gargantuan” and said it was probably due to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s “faulty birth-death model” which had overestimated net job creation at companies that have either recently started up or closed down.
The latest figures come in the wake of a bleak monthly jobs report last Friday that suggested hiring in the US had almost ground to a halt in August, with just 22,000 jobs added.
Last month, in the wake of another poor jobs report, Mr Trump sacked the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, arguing, without providing evidence, that the numbers were “rigged” against him and the Republican party.
That monthly report had included revisions to previous months’ data, which showed hiring had slowed this summer.
Mr Trump has nominated Erwin Antoni, a Maga loyalist and economist at the rightwing Heritage Foundation, to replace her. Mr Antoni is awaiting confirmation by the US Senate and has yet to take up the position, with the agency headed by a veteran official in the interim. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025