(NewsNation) — The job market had much less momentum over the past year than previously thought, the Labor Department reported Tuesday.
Annual revisions show U.S. employers added 911,000 fewer jobs than originally reported in the year that ended in March 2025, according to a preliminary estimate from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The revision was on the higher end of expectations; economists had predicted a drop of 400,000 to 1 million jobs, Reuters reported.
These are the 10 fastest-growing jobs over the next decade
Tuesday’s report confirmed what many job seekers suspected: the labor market was weaker than numbers suggested for much of 2024, even before President Donald Trump took office and imposed sweeping tariffs.
“Americans’ cautious outlook on the job market has now been validated by the hard data,” Bankrate’s senior economic analyst Mark Hamrick said in a statement.
The numbers announced Tuesday are preliminary and part of an annual process in which the BLS updates its job figures using data from state unemployment tax records. Final revisions will come out in February 2026, at which point they will be incorporated into the government’s official job figures.
The preliminary estimate gives economists a better sense of the jobs situation from April 2024 to March 2025, but says less about what’s happening now.
Recent monthly data shows the economy added just 22,000 jobs in August as unemployment rose to 4.3%, the highest since 2021. The three-month average has fallen to 29,000 jobs per month, down sharply from 111,000 per month in the first quarter before Trump announced new tariffs.
Trump has taken issue with the department’s revision process, firing BLS head Erika McEntarfer in August after accusing her, without evidence, of rigging the numbers to make him look bad. The president has nominated E.J. Antoni, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to replace McEntarfer, but he still needs to be confirmed by the Senate.
Why job numbers change: Understanding the latest revisions
Last year’s preliminary revision, released in August 2024, was also notable for being unusually large, lowering the estimate of job growth by 818,000. The final revision ended up 589,000 lower than originally reported.
Americans are losing confidence in their ability to find a new job
Data shows the number of Americans looking for jobs now outnumbers the number of open positions, for the first time since 2021.
The job market is so bad that even workers with jobs are feeling significantly less confident in their ability to find a new one, according to a new survey from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Respondents to the New York Fed’s monthly Survey of Consumer Expectations put their chances of finding a new job in the next three months at 44.9% — down 5.8 percent from the month prior and the lowest in the survey’s history dating back to June 2013.
AI has enabled Salesforce to slash 4K support roles: CEO
“The decline was broad-based across age, education, and income groups, but it was most pronounced for those with at most a high school education,” the NY Fed said in a release.
Health care and social assistance roles have been the lone bright spot this year, accounting for nearly 90% of all the private sector jobs added in 2025.
Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs are down by 42,000 since April, while the professional and business services sector has lost 74,000 jobs over the same period.
The weak jobs data makes it likely the Federal Reserve will slash its benchmark interest rate at its next meeting — something Chair Jerome Powell has been reluctant to do until the inflationary effects of Trump’s tariff policy were clearer.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
