USA Jobs Shock - Joe Blogs

[progree]

4. Quite a contrast from the headline nonfarm payroll numbers

Last edited Tue Dec 30, 2025, 03:15 PM - Edit history (1)

Establishment Survey
Table B-1 https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t17.htm
From Nov 2024 to Nov. 2025: 158,619k to 159,552k non-farm payroll jobs, an increase of 933k
Only a 119k increase from April (17k/month average), which is what everyone is yammering about, including Powell
who thinks these estimates are too high by 60k/month average (although he was speaking of April thru SEPTEMBER, 6 days before the October and November numbers came out) https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCpresconf20251210.pdf

Non-farm payrolls: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001
. . . monthly changes: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001?output_view=net_1mth


Household Survey
Employed: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12000000 (an increase of 2,558k from Nov. 2024 to Nov. 2025)
. . . monthly changes: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12000000?output_view=net_1mth
Labor Force: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11000000
. . . monthly changes: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11000000?output_view=net_1mth

Edited to fix the last link's URL, and then out of curiosity I looked at the labor force growth some more.
On the labor force, the monthly changes one (the one just above that has output_view=net_1mth) doesn't show anything for October or November, but the one with the total numbers shows a September value and a November value, and the increase in the 2-month period is 323k, an average of 162k/month FWIW.

The previous 7 monthly changes were: 232 544 -625 -130 -38 436 470 (the last one being September's incease over August). All FWIW. The 3 negative numbers in the middle sum to -793k, the total of the 7 numbers sum to 889k or 127k/month average.