U.S. jobs growth was much slower than previously reported, according to revised data released Tuesday.
The number of jobs created in the United States from April 2024 to March 2025 was revised down by 911,000 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That would roughly amount to 76,000 fewer jobs created each month of the year up until March.
The revision draws fresh attention to the weakening U.S. labor market, which added an average of only 29,000 jobs in each of the three most recent months.
The August jobs report showed that the United States added only 22,000 jobs that month and also revised June’s job growth down to a loss of 13,000 jobs.
Those datapoints have led economists and some policymakers to conclude that the U.S. labor market is now at a standstill. “The jobs engine that has been integral to U.S. economic growth defying expectations for the past four years is stalling,” Sarah House, a senior economist at Wells Fargo, said in a note Friday.
The administration’s immigration policies have also been seen as contributing to the slowdown. Analysts at Morgan Stanley said Friday that they believe the “chilling effect” of new immigration policies played a part in slowing labor force growth.
The manufacturing sector alone shrank by 78,000 jobs over the past year, the BLS said Friday, even as the Trump administration focuses heavily on rebooting the industry.
Tuesday’s data could also lend a fresh datapoint to the Federal Reserve, which is likely to cut rates at next week’s Federal Open Market Committee Meeting.
The White House said in a statement that “this is exactly why we need new leadership to restore trust and confidence in the BLS’s data on behalf of the financial markets, businesses, policymakers, and families that rely on this data to make major decisions.”
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said in a statement that “today’s massive downward revision gives the American people even more reason to doubt the integrity of data being published by BLS.”
Revisions to BLS data are a normal part of the process and do not suggest any impropriety. The annual statistics are revised every year with additional data that the Bureau collects. Some of that data is not available at the time it publishes monthly jobs reports, such as data from the Census Bureau or unemployment insurance records.
But the new numbers come as the Bureau of Labor Statistics remains under intense scrutiny from President Donald Trump and his administration. Trump fired the previous BLS chief hours after a weak jobs report in August and quickly nominated a conservative economist, E.J. Antoni, as the new head of the agency.
Antoni has been highly complimentary of controversial Trump administration policies in his writings for the Heritage Foundation and even once proposed suspending the monthly jobs reports before backing off of that idea.
Trump has said the data produced by the BLS was falsified without producing any evidence of his claim. Trump also said the weak numbers were manufactured “to make the Republicans, and me, look bad.”
Steve Kopack
Steve Kopack is a senior reporter at NBC News covering business and the economy.