Tracker
Nonfarm Payrolls
Total jobs on US payrolls outside farming.
159.0M
Thousands of persons · latest, May 2026
Source: FRED · PAYEMS · series · Jan 1939 to May 2026
· latest-revised
Reading it. Counts jobs, not people. The first print is revised for two more months.
About the bands. Shaded spans are NBER-dated US recessions, drawn as factual overlays. They mark when the economy contracted, not why. Lining an event or policy up with a move on this chart is not evidence that it caused the move.