GSI Analysis: January ’25 Jobs Report – New Jersey Private Sector Adds Jobs in January; Unemployment Rate Unchanged with Drops in Labor Force and Employment

• Total job count down 6,100, reflecting sharp drop in government, after very large December increase.
• Unemployment rate 4.6% for an eighth straight month.
• Revised numbers show higher counts of the labor force and residents at work with slightly lower unemployment rates; little change in the number of jobs.

On March 13th, New Jersey’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development issued the Monthly Jobs Report for January 2025. Dr. Charles Steindel, former Chief Economist of the State of New Jersey, analyzed the report for the Garden State Initiative:

New Jersey’s labor market was mixed in January. The number of jobs in the state is estimated to have fallen by 6,100. However, this includes an odd 12,000 drop in government employment (this cannot be the result of any DOGE activity; federal employment in the state is not large enough for that sort of swing to be at all likely, and, more concretely, the data was collected before the change in administration). Private sector jobs rose by 5,900 with most sectors seeing gains, though the bulk of the increases were in professional and business services and education and health services.

The state’s unemployment rate remained at 4.6% for the eighth straight month (this is not a record for months with no change: New Jersey’s unemployment rate was 9.5% from July 2010 through March 2011). January saw declines of around 4,400 in both the labor force and the numbers of residents at work.

Revised data are now available for the past few years. As expected, the new numbers show higher levels for both the labor force and employed residents. The new numbers for December 2024 are more than 70,000 higher for both series. The revisions generally reduced unemployment rates for 2023 and 2024—the sharp peak of 4.8% is no longer there. New Jersey’s unemployment rate remains higher than the nation’s, but the gap now looks fairly modest.

As for the job count, on balance revisions were small (the new count for December is less than 3,000 smaller than the initial estimate. There was a marked upward revision to the November-December increase, which now stands at 17,600, compared to the initial 7,200.