- by New Deal democrat
The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) is “the gold standard of US employment measures. It is an actual census of 95%+ of all employers, who must report new employees for purposes like unemployment and disability benefits. Because of this, it is used for the final revisions, a/k/a benchmarks, for monthly jobs numbers, which are estimates based on surveys. Its drawbacks are that it is not seasonally adjusted, and is delayed months after the end of the quarter.
This morning the QCEW was finally updated for Q3 of last year. And there was bad news, even compared with the benchmark revisions last month.
On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, even after the benchmark adjustment, seasonally adjusted, 70,000 more jobs added during the quarter. On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, -590,000 jobs were lost (unsurprising, given big layoffs happen in July). More importantly, on a YoY basis, the number of jobs increased 0.4% from Q3 2024.
Why is that bad? Because, according to the QCEW, on an NSA basis, -787,000 jobs were lost during Q3, and on a YoY basis, the number of jobs only increased 0.1%. Which means that the nonfarm payrolls numbers, even after the last seasonal adjustment 9show below), were still too optimistic:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1ThKq&height=490
And the YoY comparison was too optimistic as well:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1ThLu&height=490
In my review of the 2025 Q1 QCEW, I concluded that it was “suggesting there might not have been any job growth at all this year.” When I reviewed the update for Q2, I wrote that “it seems likely there was a very small gain, but not even keeping up with prime employment age population growth, i.e., firmly supporting the increase in the unemployment rate this year. And it is still possible that there have been no net employment gains whatsoever this year.” The Q3 update once again suggests there was no job growth whatsoever last year, not even the paltry 296,000 indicated by the latest benchmark revisions.
