United States: All employees, total nonfarm
Number of employees on nonfarm payrolls, seasonally adjusted (BLS Current Employment Statistics, FRED PAYEMS).
Official statisticSource figures as of October 16, 2026Sources & methods
- Period covered
- Jan 1939 – Sep 2026
- Source figures as of
- October 16, 2026
- Geography
- United States
- Sector
- Whole economy (not a single sector)
- Seasonal adjustment
- Seasonally adjusted
- Transformations
- Views other than the level (changes, averages, volatility) are calculated by CK Economics from these figures
- Revisions
- Replaced with the source’s latest figures whenever it revises them.
- Data status
- Current
Key figures
CK estimateThousands of people · calculated by CK Economics from U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data
- Latest · Sep 2026
- 159,044
- +0.3% vs a year earlier1
- 5-year change
- +7.6%
- since Sep 2021, +1.5% a year2
- 10-year change
- +9.7%
- since Sep 2016, +0.9% a year2
- Record high
- 159,044
- Sep 20263
- Record low
- 29,923
- Jan 19393
- Where the latest ranks
- 100th pct.
- Higher than 100% of the other 1,052 observations since Jan 19394
- 1Latest observation against the observation one year earlier (for weekly data, the nearest within three days).
- 2Latest observation against the observation five and ten years earlier; the yearly rate is the compound annual growth rate over the span.
- 3Highest and lowest published observations across the full history shown.
- 4Share of the other published observations that are lower than the latest one, rounded down.
Methodology
Number of employees on nonfarm payrolls, seasonally adjusted (BLS Current Employment Statistics, FRED PAYEMS). U.S. official statistics as republished by FRED. FRED does not give a publication date without an API key, so a value's date is the day CK Economics first saw it. Source series PAYEMS. Licence: Public domain (U.S. government works).
Source
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Federal Reserve Board, via FRED, FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED, retrieved 2026-10-19). https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS
All data
| Period | Value | Change y/y |
|---|---|---|
| Sep 2026 | 159,044 | +0.3% |
| Aug 2026 | 159,015 | +0.3% |
| Jul 2026 | 158,882 | +0.2% |
| Jun 2026 | 158,892 | +0.3% |
| May 2026 | 158,861 | +0.2% |
| Apr 2026 | 158,798 | +0.2% |
| Mar 2026 | 158,650 | +0.2% |
| Feb 2026 | 158,436 | +0.1% |
| Jan 2026 | 158,592 | +0.2% |
| Dec 2025 | 158,432 | +0.1% |
| Nov 2025 | 158,449 | +0.2% |
| Oct 2025 | 158,408 | +0.3% |
| Sep 2025 | 158,548 | +0.4% |
| Aug 2025 | 158,472 | +0.5% |
| Jul 2025 | 158,542 | +0.5% |
| Jun 2025 | 158,478 | +0.5% |
| May 2025 | 158,498 | +0.6% |
| Apr 2025 | 158,485 | +0.6% |
| Mar 2025 | 158,377 | +0.6% |
| Feb 2025 | 158,310 | +0.7% |
| Jan 2025 | 158,268 | +0.8% |
| Dec 2024 | 158,316 | +0.9% |
| Nov 2024 | 158,079 | +0.9% |
| Oct 2024 | 157,945 | +0.9% |