Employers add 257,000 jobs as wages rise

The jobs report released today was full of good news — 257,000 new jobs added in January. 147,000 new jobs were added by revisions to December and November data. 91,000 new jobs were added by revisions to earlier data. Average hourly wages rose, and the previous month’s wage data was revised upward.

But perhaps the best news of all is something that sounds a little odd — the unemployment rate didn’t fall.

The February Jobs Day is always unusually exciting because it features benchmark revisions to previous years’ data. This year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics re-crunched their numbers and decided that there were 91,000 more people working in the United States last year than they had previously known.

This is actually a pretty small change in the scheme of things. Benchmark revisions, on average, move the total number of jobs by about 0.3 percent of the workforce so an addition or subtraction of hundreds of thousands of jobs wouldn’t have been especially unusual.

Economists are guessing that the unemployment rate held steady at 5.6 percent in January, with nonfarm employers adding 230,000 jobs. That would be a slowdown in job creation from December, when workplaces added 252,000 jobs, and it’s also a big deceleration from November’s blazing pace of 353,000 new jobs.

It’s a deceleration, but it’s no reason to worry, according to Guy LeBas, chief fixed income strategist at financial services firm Janney Montgomery Scott, who called the underlying trend job growth “one of the brightest points for the domestic economy” in a Thursday note.

Once a month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides updated information about the unemployment rate and the number of Americans with jobs. This 12-times-a-year “Jobs Day” is the most important frequently-updated series of economic data around. But the jobs report that comes out in early February of every year — Friday, in this case — is the most important jobs report out of all 12. That’s because it’s the report that includes the benchmark revisions.

This is a process through which the BLS goes back in time and adjusts the past estimates of how many people were employed in the United States. These revisions are sometimes small, but on average they’re pretty big — on average the total number of jobs is adjusted by 0.3 percent, which given the size of the labor force amounts to 357,000 jobs.