Increase of 1 Million Private Sector Jobs This Year?

This graph and post were inspired by a recent Scott Grannis post titled "400,000 New Jobs and Counting," where Scott estimates that "new private sector jobs have increased by 400K so far this year, with 300K of those new jobs created in March alone."

The chart above shows the monthly changes in private sector employment, calculated by taking the difference between total "Civilian Employment" (data here) from the BLS Household Survey and total "Government Employment" (data here) from the Establishment Survey.

Using that measure of private sector employment:

Private sector jobs increased by 543,000 in January, 330,000 in February and 225,000 in March, for a total increase so far this year of 1,098,000 private sector jobs - the largest three-month increase in almost five years (since the three-month period ending May 2005).

Scott points out that "the household survey can have random blips, such as the 500K drop in private sector jobs in December, and the 550K jump in January." So if we ignore December and January as random blips, there would still be 555,000 private sector jobs created in February and March.

Bottom Line: Whether the increase in private sector jobs this year is 400,000, or 555,000 or 1.098 million, any of those estimates suggest that the improvements in the private sector job market are much better than what the payroll survey is showing: a total increase of 162,000 jobs this year (data here).

Comments welcome.