Official Survey of State Employment Has Overstated Job Growth Since 2022. Since the middle of 2022, the monthly jobs reports have tended to overstate actual employment growth in the state. The monthly jobs survey has been revised downward routinely over this period, as we detailed here. During the most recent period that was revised (covering April, May, and June), state job growth was revised downward by roughly 150,000 jobs.
Shifting Focus Now to Hybrid Measure of Employment Growth That Has Tracked Final Data More Closely. Given the recent tendency for the monthly jobs report to overstate employment growht, we have shifted our focus to a hybrid measure of the labor market that averages the main business survey with another monthly federal survey of employment, the "household survey," which officials use to calculate the state's unemployment rate. The average of these two monthly trends has tended to track the final jobs tally more closely in recent years.