Skip to content
Search
Contact Us
Search
Contact Us
Background curve
Left Arrow
Back to INDUSTRY NEWS

Jobs Report Special - US Added Just 15k Jobs/Month in 2025

February 11, 2026

How happy is Warsh that he doesn’t have to worry about lowering rates in the face of a 130k NFP print?

The headline 130k has all the talking heads on Bloomberg swooning. The consensus forecast was 65k, but I thought we all had agreed not to overreact to this? The last two months were revised down by 17k but we’re all just going to ignore that?

Making the commentators' reaction even more embarrassing is that we got the annual jobs revisions. Last year’s jobs were revised lower by 862k. This pushed the 2025 monthly average down from 49k to just 15k.

I’ve written a lot about the bizarrely named Birth Death Adjustments as a primary culprit for the consistent overestimation of job gains. The BLS guesses at the number of companies created or closed each month and uses that to extrapolate jobs created/lost as a result.

Since covid, these estimates have been dramatically off, leading to the huge downward revisions. The BLS finally updated its methodology (SMBC Birth Death Analysis).

The good news? The monthly jobs data should be more accurate.

The bad news? The monthly jobs data should be more accurate.

Maybe the headline 130k today is more legit than we’ve been used to because of the methodology shift. And the UR dropping to 4.3% is good news. But I still think the overall labor market picture is one of weakness.

Job openings plunged 386k last month alone and are down a million in the last year. There are 961k more unemployed than job openings. Ignoring covid, that’s the weakest since 2017.

Layoffs are still small enough that the unemployment rate hasn’t surged, but the UR is a lagging indicator. Hiring freezes come first, and that’s what we’re seeing. Maybe we can avoid transitioning into the layoff phase, but the labor market is hanging on by a thread.

Rates are up on the news, particularly the front end as the market adjusts expectations for rate cuts. There’s still a 65% chance of at least two cuts this year, but the first cut has been pushed into the second half of the year.