Nonfarm payroll growth revised down by 818,000, Labor Department says [Video]

The U.S. economy created 818,000 fewer jobs than originally reported in the 12-month period through March 2024, the Labor Department reported Wednesday.

As part of its preliminary annual benchmark revisions to the nonfarm payroll numbers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the actual job growth was nearly 30% less than the initially reported 2.9 million from April 2023 through March of this year.

The revision to the total payrolls level of -0.5% is the largest since 2009. The numbers are routinely revised each month, but the BLS does a broader revision each year when it gets the results of the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.

Wall Street had been waiting for the revisions numbers, with many economists expecting a sizeable reduction in the originally reported numbers.

Even with the revisions, job creation during the period stood at more than 2 million, but the report could be seen as an indication that the labor market is not as …