Image Source: Pixabay
 

The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) for Q1 of this year was released this morning. Perhaps more importantly, the numbers for last year were finalized. This forms the “preliminary benchmark” for the actual reported changes to payrolls over that period, which will show up in next February’s report for January.

To reiterate, the QCEW is an actual census of 95%+ of all employers, who must report new employees for purposes like unemployment and disability benefits. It is the gold standard and is used for the final revisions, a/k/a benchmarks, for monthly jobs numbers, which are estimates based on surveys.

Per the release, there were -911,000 fewer jobs created in the period than are currently reflected in the monthly payrolls totals. The report is not seasonally adjusted, but here are the YoY% changes as currently reported by the payrolls survey vs. the new preliminary QCEW-based benchmark:
 

[YoY% change; NY Times via Ben Casselman]
 

On a YoY basis, for all of 2024, about 500,000 fewer jobs were created than we thought based on the monthly payroll series. But even at the end of 2024, on a year-over-year basis employment grew by about 1.4 million, or 0.9%. These are final numbers.

Then in the first quarter of this year, comparisons fell off a cliff again. On a *preliminary* basis, only about 675,000 jobs were added YoY, or an increase of only 0.4%. 

These are not seasonally adjusted numbers, so although we can only estimate what the seasonally adjusted monthly change would be in the first three months of this year, preliminarily, the 333,000 gain in payrolls turns into a -12,000 *decline.” This is based on a 0.9% seasonally adjusted YoY gain through December 2024, adjusting down the March 2024 number based on the final benchmark, and then multiplying that by 1.004. More sophisticated methods will arrive at somewhat different estimates, but suffice it to say that as of now, the QCEW is suggesting there might not have been any job growth at all this year.

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