Comparing Jobs Growth: Biden’s Final 19 Months vs. Trump’s First 19 Months

Every month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports how many jobs the U.S. economy added or lost. Six charts below use that data to compare two specific stretches of time: the last 19 months of Joe Biden’s term (roughly July 2023 through January 2025) and the first 19 months of Donald Trump’s second term (roughly February 2025 through August 2026). Lining these two periods up side by side, month one against month one, is one way to compare the pace of job growth under each.

All figures are seasonally adjusted, meaning BLS has already smoothed out predictable patterns – like holiday retail hiring or summer construction jobs – so one month can be fairly compared to the next.

Here’s what the charts show, in plain language.

Total Jobs: The Big Picture

Chart 1 simply tracks the total number of nonfarm jobs in the economy, month by month, from mid-2023 to late summer 2026. “Nonfarm” is the standard BLS category that excludes farm work and a few other small categories – it’s the headline number you hear described as “the jobs report.”

The line climbs the whole way, from roughly 156.0 million jobs in July 2023 to about 159.1 million by August 2026 – a gain of around 3.1 million jobs over the full 38 months shown. The climb isn’t perfectly smooth: there’s a flatter stretch in the middle of 2025 before the line resumes rising.

Chart 3 breaks that same growth into monthly chunks – how many jobs were added or lost each month – rather than the running total. This is the more volatile view, and it’s where the two periods are directly compared:

In the final 19 months of Biden’s term, monthly job gains averaged roughly 125,000 per month (the blue line).
In the first 19 months of Trump’s second term, monthly job gains averaged roughly 40,000 per month (the red line).

A few individual months stand out. There’s a sharp spike to about 240,000 jobs right at the handoff point (January 2025), and a sharp one-month drop of roughly -150,000 jobs that shows up during the Trump period, around early 2026. Single months like these pull hard on a 19-month average, which is worth keeping in mind – more on that below.

Chart 2 adds those monthly changes up and expresses them as cumulative growth, with each period’s starting point set to 100 so they can be compared on equal footing regardless of how large the economy was at the start. By month 19:

The Biden-period line (blue) reaches about 101.4-101.5 – roughly 1.4-1.5% total growth over 19 months.
The Trump-period line (red) reaches about 100.5 – roughly 0.5% total growth over 19 months.

Private-Sector Jobs: Stripping Out Government

The second set of three charts repeats the same comparison, but using private-sector jobs only – total nonfarm employment minus government jobs at the federal, state, and local level. This is a useful second cut because it isolates job growth in businesses from job growth (or cuts) on public payrolls.

Chart 1 shows private-sector employment rising from about 133.2 million in July 2023 to roughly 135.7 million by August 2026, a gain of about 2.5 million private-sector jobs over the full period.

Chart 3 shows the monthly averages for this narrower measure:

Biden-period average: roughly 80,000 private-sector jobs per month.
Trump-period average: roughly 50,000 private-sector jobs per month.

Notice the gap is narrower here than it was for total nonfarm jobs. That’s a clue worth following (see below).

Chart 2 shows the cumulative private-sector growth: the Biden-period line reaches about 101.1-101.2 by month 19, while the Trump-period line reaches about 100.7-100.8. Private-sector growth was slower in the more recent period, but the two lines sit closer together than they did in the total-jobs comparison.

A Useful Side-by-Side: Where Did the Gap Narrow?

Comparing the total-jobs numbers to the private-sector numbers reveals something the individual charts don’t spell out directly: the difference between “total nonfarm” and “private sector” is government employment.

In the Biden-period window, total nonfarm jobs grew faster (~125,000/month) than private-sector jobs alone (~80,000/month) – implying government payrolls were adding roughly 45,000 jobs per month on average.
In the Trump-period window, the relationship flips: private-sector jobs grew faster (~50,000/month) than total nonfarm jobs (~40,000/month) – implying government payrolls were shrinking by roughly 10,000 jobs per month on average.

In other words, part of why the “total jobs” gap between the two periods looks larger than the “private sector” gap is that government hiring patterns moved in opposite directions in the two windows.

How to Read This Data Responsibly

A few caveats are worth stating plainly, since monthly jobs data gets used – and misused – in political arguments constantly:

Monthly data is noisy, and single outliers matter a lot in a short window. A 19-month average can be swung significantly by one unusually strong or weak month, like the spike and the sharp drop visible in the charts above.
BLS revises these numbers. The most recent months in any jobs series are preliminary and typically get revised, sometimes substantially, in the following months as more complete data comes in.
Presidents don’t control monthly jobs numbers in real time. Economic momentum, Federal Reserve policy, global conditions, and decisions made months or years earlier all show up in the data with a lag – meaning early months of any administration partly reflect conditions it inherited rather than new policy.
A transition period mixes two administrations. Because hiring decisions take time to show up in payroll data, the data right around a presidential handoff reflects some combination of outgoing and incoming policy.

Readers sympathetic to the outgoing administration will point to the consistently stronger monthly averages and faster cumulative growth as evidence of a more robust jobs market. Readers sympathetic to the current administration may point to the private-sector gap being notably narrower than the total-jobs gap, note that one very weak month is dragging the average down, or argue that the lag effects above mean it’s too early to draw firm conclusions from the first year and a half of data. Both of those are reasonable things to weigh – the charts themselves only show what happened, not why.

The Bottom Line

By both measures shown here – total nonfarm payrolls and private-sector payrolls – job growth was slower in the first 19 months of Trump’s second term than in the final 19 months of Biden’s term, whether measured by monthly average or cumulative percentage growth. The gap is wider in total jobs than in private-sector jobs alone, which traces back to opposite trends in government employment during the two windows. How much weight to put on that pattern, given the caveats above, is where reasonable people will disagree.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does “seasonally adjusted” mean in jobs data?
It means BLS has mathematically removed predictable seasonal hiring patterns (like holiday retail jobs or summer construction work) so that one month’s jobs number can be fairly compared to any other month’s, rather than comparing, say, December to July.

What’s the difference between “nonfarm payrolls” and “private-sector jobs”?
Total nonfarm payrolls include all jobs except farm work; private-sector jobs are that same total minus government employment at the federal, state, and local level. Comparing the two separates business hiring from public-sector hiring trends.

Why compare the last 19 months of one term to the first 19 months of the next?
It’s the longest stretch of directly comparable, equal-length data available as of this writing, since Trump’s second term is roughly 19 months old. Shorter or longer windows would tell a somewhat different story, which is part of why the caveats above matter.