The October 7, 2016 employment release contained two different September gains: 156,000 nonfarm payroll jobs and 354,000 employed people in the household survey. Both were seasonally adjusted. This October 9 retrospective examines what those earlier figures measured; it does not report a Sunday announcement or treat the larger number as a correction to the smaller one. [jobs2016]

The establishment survey counts someone separately on each employer’s payroll. The household survey counts a person once, even with several jobs, and includes groups such as unincorporated self-employed workers that the payroll survey excludes. BLS also described different sampling precision: its approximate threshold for a statistically significant monthly employment change was 100,000 for establishments and 500,000 for households. A larger reported change is not automatically stronger evidence. [jobs2016]

The September 30 personal-income release adds a third measurement boundary. BEA defines personal income to include receipts from work, property, financial assets and transfers, while disposable personal income subtracts personal current taxes. Its August increase of 0.2 percent in disposable income was a national aggregate, not an earnings increase for the people newly counted as employed in September. The months and concepts differ. [income2016]

The useful comparison is therefore a set of separate indicators, not arithmetic that merges their headlines. Payrolls describe jobs; the household survey describes people’s employment status; the income accounts describe broader receipts. Our interpretation is that these releases cannot establish how much a newly employed person took home. The figures here preserve the releases available before October 9, including the BEA vintage now marked superseded. [jobs2016][income2016]

Source documents

  1. Personal Income and Outlays, August 2016https://www.bea.gov/news/2016/personal-income-and-outlays-august-2016
  2. Employment Situation, September 2016https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_10072016.htm