Monthly State Jobs Estimates Are Revised Annually. Each month our office publishes the most recent state employment figures from the the Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey. State employment figures come from this monthly survey, which is based on a sample of businesses in the state. Because these data are based on a sample, once per year the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) updates the monthly survey estimates to match complete administrative data from states’ Unemployment Insurance programs.
Federal Researchers Now Publishing Quarterly Revisions. Although the BLS only revises the state-level survey once per year, the underlying data used to revise the CES survey is collected quarterly. Taking advantage of this asynchrony, in 2021, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia began publishing state-level “early revisions” based on the same underlying data but revised more frequently.
Newest Revision Shows State Lost Jobs from March Through June. Based on the most recent release of the early benchmarks, shown in the figure below, the monthly business survey appears to have overestimated job growht by 150,000 jobs. Specifically, the rebench shows that payroll jobs declined by 78,000 from March 2024 through June 2023, while the preliminary monthly reports showed a solid increase in job growth (+68,000 jobs). Data since July 2024 has not yet been rebenched. As such, the figure below does not include these more recent months.
State Jobs Survey Now Routinely Overestimating Monthly Job Gains. Since mid-2022, as shown below, five out of six quarterly early benchmark revisions have shown weaker employment trends than first reported by the monthly survey. For context, the monthly survey has overestimated net job growth by 25,000 jobs per month on average over this period. Going forward, our office will focus on a hybrid measure of real-time employment changes that averages the monthly business survey and the monthly household survey (which has tracked final jobs figures more closely over the past two years) as part of our work to track the state's labor market.