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The Labor Department’s January survey will include revisions making data for previous months look stronger in some cases and weaker in others.
Feb. 6, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET
The Labor Department’s latest monthly report on hiring and unemployment will include revisions for previous months that should give a more accurate picture of the U.S. job market — but that could also sow confusion.
When the data is released on Friday, one major measure of employment will be revised up. Another will be revised down. Some historical numbers will be revised, but others won’t. And the updates, though part of a routine process, will be taking place in a political environment where both sides have at times expressed skepticism of government economic statistics.
“There is going to be a massive amount of confusion,” said Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project, an economic policy arm of the Brookings Institution.
Here is what economists say you will need to know about the revisions to make sense of the numbers.
The revisions are part of a longstanding annual process.
The monthly job figures are based on two surveys, one of employers and one of households. Those surveys are generally reliable — they involve a number of interviews far larger than a presidential election poll, for example — but they aren’t perfect. And so, once a year, the government reconciles the numbers with less timely but more reliable data from other sources. Similar processes are in place for revising other government statistics, like gross domestic product and personal income.
“Revisions are how statistical agencies achieve both timeliness and accuracy,” said Jed Kolko, who oversaw economic statistics at the Commerce Department during the Biden administration. “Near-real-time data like the jobs report later get revised to match other data sources that are more accurate but take longer to collect and publish.”
The revisions being released on Friday were scheduled far in advance and will use methodologies that were announced ahead of time, allowing economists, including Mr. Kolko and Ms. Edelberg, to publish detailed forecasts of what the new figures will show.
