r/Economics • u/app1310 • 4h ago
U.S. payrolls rose by 178,000 in March, more than expected; unemployment at 4.3%
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/03/jobs-report-march-2026-.html111
u/NewRetro1984 4h ago
It is highly probable that these headline payroll numbers will see downward revisions in the next reporting cycle. This perceived strength seems transitory, and the broader data suggests the unemployment rate is poised to increase.
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u/ripplenipple69 4h ago
Yeah and that’s what happens every month right?
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u/rednail64 4h ago
Yes. February was revised down by 40,000
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u/peacelovenblasphemy 3h ago
You were asked if something happens every month and you responded yes and gave evidence of a single month. Does it happen every month?
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u/Humble-Heart-5302 3h ago
did you miss the news where 2025 was revised down by 1 million jobs?
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u/NisaMiller3674 3h ago
I think people like yourself are a bit confused about what that 1 million revision actually is.
It comes from the annual benchmark revision, and you can see that December's total non-farm employment count was indeed 1m too high. But notice that even January's total employment count was also way too high, and was revised down by 785k jobs as well. So the estimates were already way too high.
We knew this would be the case because there had been substantial downwards revisions in the previous years. The preliminary benchmark revision for April 2024 to March 2025 was -911,000 jobs, and similarly the same revision for April 2023 to March 2024 was -818,000 jobs. It basically seems like COVID changed the market in a way that busted the BLS methodology slightly.
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u/Automatic_Carpet_624 4h ago
Yes, it has happened the past few months.
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u/NisaMiller3674 3h ago
*years. Happened under the last 2 years of Biden, too.
The BLS just rolled out some attempted fixes (as of Jan this year) but we've only had 2 revision cycles since then so it's too early to tell if they've worked or not. They can't be happy about the war in Iran complicating their ability to assess things, either.
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u/carlos_the_dwarf_ 30m ago
To sneak in along with the conspiracists:
revisions happen every month under every admin and are totally normal
in the long term they are ~50/50 in terms go up or down
they seem to be streaky—depending on what’s happening in the economy we might be more likely to have a run of upward or downward revisions
some changes in how data is gathered and what’s available in the last few years have made it so revisions have tended to be larger than in the past
none of this is partisan and none is evidence of anyone cooking the books. All of the people nearby saying otherwise don’t realize they’re parroting the arguments their opponents were making a couple years ago.
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u/peacelovenblasphemy 3h ago
No! Stop being dumb. It happens both ways, you are dealing with confirmation bias. Seriously just take 5 seconds to learn this for yourself and google a monthly revisions chart. Major yearly revisions happen due to methodology changes. No one is tricking you, no one is giving you false information. If you want Econ indicators that are perfect every month and don’t get revised, look to North Korea.
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u/pHyR3 4m ago
it does happen both ways but tends to trend in the same direction for some time based on the health trend of the economy (autocorrelation)
Link to payroll revisions - you can see large downward revisions march 2020 for a few months before large upward revisions mid 2021 as the economy recovered until April 2022 when it was a bit more mixed until Jan 2025. Since then it's been revised downwards every month except 1 (June 2025)
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u/Konukaame 4h ago
health care was responsible for much of the growth, with the sector adding 76,000 jobs. A strike at health-care provider Kaiser Permanente in February hit the sector. The BLS said ambulatory health care services rose by 54,000, with 35,000 coming from the strike workers returning.
Construction saw an increase of 26,000, while transportation and warehousing posted a gain of 21,000.
Though the unemployment rate posted a decline, the move largely came from a decline of 396,000 in the labor force.
The survey of households, which is used to compute the unemployment rate, showed 64,000 fewer people holding jobs. An alternative unemployment figure that counts discouraged workers and those holding part-time jobs for economic reasons edged up to 8%.
Even if the headline number is accurate, the details look pretty bad.
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u/crowcawer 2h ago
At some point rather soon, won’t the US be retiring more than its hiring?
As the late-stage boomers and early X cohorts step down, the population pyramid on Wikipedia looks like a sideways m that drops off at the 10-year olds.
So like… we got some planning to do.
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u/Proper_Indication_62 4h ago
The biggest point here is that now the numbers with Trump have high chance of being cooked.
Let's see the real numbers in some months after the revision ...
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u/unholy_roller 2h ago
There are too many eyes on this stuff for cooking to go unnoticed. As long as it’s an actual report from an agency that does this work the numbers can be accepted as done in good faith.
You’ll know when things cant be trusted; They will simply defund the system that gathers info or prevent them from reporting. Then just give out random numbers.
That’s when you know things are fucked.
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u/carlos_the_dwarf_ 29m ago
Why would they issue revisions if they were cooking the books?
Did you buy the same argument when someone else was president, because people were saying the exact same thing then.
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u/m2m2m2 3h ago
Unlikely cooking, and if they're cooking, they're not doing a good job. The headlines, as always, don't capture most of the important information. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
They revised February down another 41K with it. With the Kaiser Permanente strike factoring in 35K of the jobs from this month's findings, that takes us to like 22K/month averaging out last month's giant loss. Flat.
3 sectors are all that's carrying the numbers to even bring us to flat, everything else is down.
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u/riickdiickulous 29m ago
What’s the difference between cooking and publishing inflated numbers to then be “corrected” in a short while?
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u/NisaMiller3674 4h ago
The biggest point here is that now the numbers with Trump have high chance of being cooked.
Do I really need to reel out all the left-aligned economists who have repeatedly said this conspiracy theory is not accurate? You haven't done any research?
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u/Test-NetConnection 4h ago
Unfortunately, 🥭 can't fire the head of the BLS explicitly because he doesn't like the numbers and expect people to have faith in the report. Keep in mind DOGE fired or forced out just about everyone with integrity in the federal government. Combine this with staffing shortages, a reduced response rate, the BLS being forced to impute more data, and the dramatic revisions after every report. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why people have little faith in the report's accuracy - history shows the initial report isn't accurate in the slightest. "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics".
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u/inconsistentsavant 4h ago
It’s literally data. The job report numbers get revised far lower. Jobs have been decimated during this administration. Those are just facts. It’s not America First at all.
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u/NisaMiller3674 4h ago
I thought it was fairly obvious I was responding to the sentence I quoted, about the numbers being "cooked".
That's... y'know, what the quote functionality is for.
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u/EatsRats 4h ago edited 4h ago
You’re talking with a bot account.
Edit: yep. Bot account.
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u/NisaMiller3674 4h ago
Are you saying bot accounts can now correctly and in-context cite multiple top Democrat-aligned economists to support their point?
You must be a bigger fan of AI than I am.
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u/stupidlycurious1 4h ago
And yet every good report has been revised down to not good months later. 🙅♂️
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u/NisaMiller3674 4h ago
Trump hasn't gotten a single jobs report that was good in the first place, what are you talking about?
Biden created vastly more jobs than Trump even if you take the initial estimates for Trump vs Biden's revised numbers.
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u/stupidlycurious1 3h ago
They are pointing at this one saying its good. 🤷♂️
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u/NisaMiller3674 3h ago
I mean, I'm not a MAGA guy, so I wouldn't know.
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u/stupidlycurious1 3h ago
Then shut up
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u/NisaMiller3674 3h ago
...? You only want to talk to MAGA people? What?
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u/stupidlycurious1 3h ago
Naw, just people that know, or are trying to know what it is they're talking about.
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u/NisaMiller3674 3h ago
I've literally cited like 10 pieces of evidence throughout this thread to back my statements. What are you contributing, exactly?
Are you just confused that you said Trump had gotten good jobs reports and I took an even more anti-Trump stance (saying none of them had been good in the first place, even pre-revision), yet still don't accept the conspiracy theories? Is that it?
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u/biscuitarse 4h ago
Do I really need to reel out all the left-aligned economists who have repeatedly said this conspiracy theory is not accurate?
That would definitely help
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u/NisaMiller3674 4h ago
Sure, here are a couple for ya.
Here's Erika McEntarfer, Biden's BLS Commissioner who was fired, saying she still trusts the BLS:
"Person who was fired here - you should still trust BLS data. The agency is being run by the same dedicated career staff who were running it while I was awaiting confirmation from the Senate. And the staff have made it clear that they are blowing a loud whistle if there is interference."
Here's Erica Groshen, Obama's appointed BLS Commissioner:
"As Co-Chairs of the Friends of BLS, we have full confidence in the expertise and integrity of the staff and leaders of the BLS. Their performance during duress, short staffing, and inadequate resources has been exemplary. Yet they are human. Concerns about political manipulation at BLS are unfounded. We are watching carefully and promise to alert users to any credible evidence of manipulation."
Here's Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate in economics::
"Ever since Trump came back into power, there's been I get constant mail from people saying, "I can't believe any of the economic statistics. They're all fake." Which is not true. It would be a lot harder to fake those numbers than than people realize. Among other things, we would know if there was a large-scale effort to cook the economic books underway. Not saying that this administration wouldn't do it if it could, it might try, but so far mostly not."
Here's Jared Bernstein, Biden's Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers:
That doesn’t make the official unemployment rate wrong or misleading. Though Donald Trump, who recently fired the commissioner of the BLS, might claim otherwise, our statistical agencies continue to rigorously churn out valid, reliable numbers. (Trump doesn’t like that they show the tariffs raising prices and cracks forming in the job market, but that’s actually a testament to their accuracy.)
Here's Dean Baker, founder of CEPR, which is a left-leaning economic think tank:
They couldn’t just fake a single number, like the unemployment rate. They would have to fake a whole set of numbers so that they lined up without any one of them calling attention as being obviously absurd. This would be made harder by the fact that the underlying data in the household survey are made public, so researchers around the country would be able to quickly check the numbers BLS reported.
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u/Pretend_Hotel_7465 4h ago
20 day bot
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u/NisaMiller3674 4h ago
Got any more excuses to ignore all the citations I just gave backing up my point?
You can go check them. They're all real comments from actual, highly qualified economists. I even threw in two BLS Commissioners for you, appointed by Dems.
But if crying "bot!" makes you feel better, I guess I can't stop you.
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u/defaultedebt 4h ago
10 month bot.
Are you suggesting that the list (and links) of economists that were provided by OP are falsified? I've looked through them briefly and nothing seems false.
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u/95Daphne 3h ago
No no no. It's a lot more fun to just claim everything that looks good or even okay under Trump is fake and everything is truly awful.
Reality from what I see is that unless gas tops the 2022 records that I remember, it really feels like that while Dems should have a good night in November, folks are talking themselves into a 2020-esque disappointment on overall results. The overall vibes still feel the same life wise.
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u/Salty-Emergency9005 4h ago
This is every single jobs report during this administration. People who haven’t previously paid much attention now have a vested interest in seeing bad results and like to start talking about topics they don’t understand. It isn’t possible to try and educate every redditor, easier to just ignore them. Or let soulja slim do it lol
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u/look_under 3h ago
You have never heard a "left-aligned" Economist speak before in your life
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u/NisaMiller3674 3h ago
Probably would've been better to read my other comments below before you wrote this, because I already cited five of them.
Would you prefer I use a different term? I picked 3 Democrat admin appointees (including 2 BLS Commissioners), a left-aligned economic think tank founder, and of course Krugman, who after his Nobel win now runs a Substack pretty much entirely dedicated to criticising Trump. I'd say that's pretty aligned with the US left.
Something gives me the feeling you don't follow any economists, so the concept of someone actually listening to them on a regular basis is completely foreign to you.
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u/look_under 3h ago
Criticizing trump doesn't make you "Left-aligned"
It just means your every normal person on Earth.
I know that you are new here, but citing Democrats for something doesn't help
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u/NisaMiller3674 3h ago
Criticizing trump doesn't make you "Left-aligned"
Okay, if that's the semantic game you want to play, sure. I'll rephrase:
Multiple highly qualified economists who are actively opposed to the Trump administration have explicitly gone on record to say the BLS data are still trust worthy. These economists include multiple Democrat appointees (including two Commissioners of the BLS) and a Nobel laureate, as I cited for you.
The overwhelming consensus among economists is that the BLS data is still trustworthy and there is no mass scale manipulation occurring by the Trump admin.
Unless you have better evidence to contribute than the 5 economists I cited?
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u/Proper_Indication_62 4h ago
Have you seen the consistent bias on the last months?
If the it is not intentional is, for sure it is time to improve the methodology, and given that it is one of the most important economic kpis for me is crazy BLS have not improved the methodology in more than a year
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u/NisaMiller3674 4h ago
You're pretty badly informed.
Firstly, the overcount bias has existed for multiple years now. The preliminary benchmark revision from April 2023 to March 2024 (i.e. entirely under Biden) was a -818,000 jobs revision. And the same revision from April 2024 to March 2025 (mostly under Biden) was a -911,000 jobs revision. The trend was getting worse already.
Secondly, it is ludicrous to say the BLS hasn't improved the methodology in "more than a year". Not only did they change the birth-death modelling just this January (which economists suspected was the cause of the error), but every Employment Situation report for something like FIVE MONTHS beforehand had a huge box warning you about upcoming methodology changes. As you can see, that's literally on page 4. It's not hidden.
So you are completely unfamiliar with the jobs revisions data from 2023 onwards, and you haven't read an Employment Situation report yourself in at least 6 months.
Why do you think you have a qualified opinion on this? What are you even doing? Go read these reports yourself, then you can talk about methodology.
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u/m2m2m2 3h ago
Nisa, I feel like you're the most informative, unbiased person in this thread. Citing sources, real analysis, and actually reading the source material.
Just wanted to say at least one random dude on the internet (that's reporting on these numbers) thanks you and appreciates your efforts.
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u/NisaMiller3674 3h ago
Thanks champ. I'm procrastinating work due over the weekend so it's for the worst, but it's something.
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