Benchmark revisions add 91,000 jobs to 2014

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.

But it’s change in a positive direction, and that’s very nice to see.