Image Source: Pexels

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.

The important news is that, after a considerable delay due to the government shutdown, it was released for Q2 this morning.  And there was good news and bad news.

The good news is that, on a non-seasonally adjusted basis, 2.3 million jobs were added in the 2nd quarter of this year, the same number as was the case in for the NSA private monthly payrolls number. After seasonal adjustment, that translated into just under 200,000 jobs net for the three months, as per the below graph of SA and NSA private nonfarm payrolls over the past four years through June:

Source

The bad news is that, in contrast to the 1.286 million jobs added in the 12 months after June 2024, only 237,000 were added per the QCEW for the entire 12 months period. In other words, beginning in late 2024, the jobs sector has been dead in the water.

Per previous releases of the QCEW, even at the end of 2024, on a year over year basis employment grew by about 1.4 million, or 0.9%. Then in the first quarter of this year, comparisons fell off a cliff again. Based on the most recent updated QCEW data, only about 427,000 jobs were added NSA YoY through the end of March. So there was further deceleration in Q2. 

These are not seasonally adjusted numbers, so it is entirely possible that the NSA gain turns into an actual decline. In my August review of the Q1 QCEW, I concluded that it wss “suggesting there might not have been any job growth at all this year.” Updated through Q2, 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. 

More By This Author: