Revisions to Payroll Employment Gains in Historical Context visualizes a monthly assessment of volatility in U.S. payroll employment data based on revisions from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This tool follows the methodology in Leduc, Oliveira, and Paulson (2025), which analyzes data reliability in the context of declining survey response rates.
This data page references historical archives of each data release on payroll employment, which can be accessed through repositories with the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. These data sets report how data have been revised over time as statistical agencies obtain more information.
With each new monthly data release, the BLS typically revises the payroll employment readings over the prior two months. This data page calculates revisions to payroll employment gains—that is, the change in the payroll employment level from month to month—using the change between the first release and revised second release of the data for each month, also known as the first revision. The second release provides a refined estimate for a given month, usually one month after the initial release.
Figure 1 shows the monthly revision to payroll employment gains since 1990 (blue bars) as well as the average monthly revision (red dashed line) for 1990–2019. Data are shown in absolute terms.
This page also assesses how first revisions to payroll employment gains are distributed across the entire available sample, as introduced in Leduc and Oliveira (2025), with additional data stretching back to July 1963. The histogram bars in Figure 2 show the shares of the total number of revisions across the distribution, divided into 26 equal-size bins within the range of minimum to maximum historical values for first revisions. The green bar in Figure 2 highlights the bin where the latest available first revision falls along the distribution.
Figure 1: Monthly absolute revisions in payroll employment gains
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics and authors’ calculations.
Figure 2: Distribution of revisions in payroll employment gains since July 1963
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics and authors’ calculations.
References
Leduc, Sylvain, and Luiz E. Oliveira. 2025. “Update on Payroll Employment Gains Data Revisions.” SF Fed Blog, August 29.
Leduc, Sylvain, Luiz E. Oliveira, and Caroline Paulson. 2025. “Do Low Survey Response Rates Threaten Data Dependence?” FRBSF Economic Letter 2025-07 (March 31).
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