U.S. jobs data on Wednesday is set to pull back the curtain on the past year’s labor market, and offer the clearest picture yet of a period when hiring in America appeared to slow down.
January’s employment report, delayed by a brief government shutdown, will be released at 8:30 a.m. ET. It will arrive alongside critical revisions to monthly jobs data from last year.
As President Donald Trump and his party crafts an economic pitch for Republicans heading into the 2026 midterm elections, Wednesday’s employment reports could fuel a narrative that either helps, or hinders, their efforts.
Every year in January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revises recent labor market data to incorporate a set of state data which helps the agency bolster its reports’ accuracy. However, because collecting and analyzing state records takes time, the agency does this type of revision only once a year.
A preliminary estimate issued last year by the BLS projected that annual employment for March 2024 through March 2025 would be marked down by more than 900,000 jobs once all the data was in from states. The bureau will issue its final mark down of the year ending in March 2025 on Wednesday.
The BLS will also release revised monthly jobs numbers for all of 2025 on Wednesday. So far, each reported month of jobs data has been revised down. Wednesday will be the first opportunity to revise December’s employment figures.
The revisions themselves do not indicate that the previously released data was somehow flawed or manipulated. Nor are they a sign of anything improper at government data agencies.
For the month of January, analysts expect to see an addition of just 55,000 jobs. The unemployment rate is expected to remain steady at 4.4%.
If accurate, that would make January the fourth straight month of fewer than 60,000 monthly additions. October’s payrolls number was negative, thanks to thousands of federal workers who left government payrolls.
A White House pre-buttal
Trump administration officials this week have signaled that they are prepared for Wednesday’s final revisions to paint a gloomy picture of the labor market in the first year of the president’s second term and likely even before that, going back to 2024.
“The jobs report’s going to come out tomorrow. We have to revise our expectations down significantly for what a monthly job number should look like,” White House senior trade advisor Peter Navarro said Tuesday on Fox Business.
Navarro claimed the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement operations and deportations have reduced the size of the U.S. workforce, resulting in a similarly sized cut to monthly job growth.
Data on undocumented immigrants in the labor market is notoriously difficult to collect, given that many workers are paid under the table and are not included on formal payrolls.
Even before any new data is released, hiring in 2025 was sluggish at best.
The U.S. economy added 584,000 total jobs, which was the slowest year for hiring outside of a recession since 2003. Including recessions, it would be the slowest year for hiring since the 2020 pandemic.
A day before Navarro’s appearance, National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett told CNBC, “You should expect slightly smaller job numbers that are consistent with high GDP growth right now.”
“One shouldn’t panic if you see a sequence of numbers that are lower than you’re used to,” said Hassett, “Because, again, population growth is going down and productivity growth is skyrocketing.”
Also on Monday, the White House released a memo titled, “Don’t Be a Panican. We’re Winning — and We’re Not Slowing Down.”
The memo listed several of the administration’s recent actions, but the intent seemed the same as Navarro’s and Hassett’s comments: To counter a narrative the Trump administration expects Wednesday’s jobs numbers to drive.
A ‘sloppy’ year for data
Analysts and labor economists see view past year as a confusing time for both U.S. labor markets and the government data that tracks them.
“We know 2025 was sloppy,” Mike Skordeles, head of U.S. economics at Truist Financial, told NBC News in an interview.
“You had a lot of pull forward in demand as companies and individuals were trying to sidestep tariffs or other things, but primarily tariffs, and it caused a lot of distortions,” he said.
Skordeles expects to see that 65,000 jobs were added in January.
“The labor market remains weak,” Federal Reserve Governor Christoper Waller said in a statement at the end of January. “Payroll gains in 2025 were very weak.”
“Compared to the prior ten-year average of about 1.9 million jobs created per year, payrolls increased just under 600,000 for 2025,” said Waller, who has a permanent vote on interest rates.
He predicted the revisions Wednesday would show, “Virtually no growth in payroll employment in 2025. Zero. Zip. Nada.”
“This does not remotely look like a healthy labor market,” he said.
