Officially, NYC Lost 20k Jobs During 2025. Actually, We Gained Just About That Many.
We started 2026 with incomplete employment data (largely thanks to the lag in jobs reports during the six-week-long federal government shutdown late in 2025). But based on what we did know, we believed New York City’s job growth had been positive in 2025, although slower than in 2024. One of the sectors of the economy apparently performing best, based on initial reports for 2025, was health care and social assistance. They showed 70,000+ job growth, mostly in home health and personal care aides (“homecare” aides for short).
However, earlier this month the New York State Department of Labor (DOL) released its annual “benchmark revisions,” which reconcile employment statistics gathered from a quarterly census of employment wages. (For a description of benchmarking methodology, see “Note: Benchmarking Jobs” below.) They showed several anticipated upward revisions in key sectors – but also a very abrupt April 2025 decline in the health care and social assistance sector, driven by an unexpected 43,000 falloff in homecare jobs.
The result: A reported net job decline in the five boroughs of some 20,000 jobs – a figure cited in headlines, and in one of The New York Times’s “first 100 days” interviews with Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
But this year’s revision introduced an unprecedented administrative change that distorts the economic interpretation of the city’s monthly employment data.
Bottom line: by our analysis, New York City gained 22,000 jobs in 2025. And while the city’s private sector job growth was weaker than in 2024 (after our adjustments), it was still stronger than national private sector job growth, and slightly ahead of private job growth in the rest of the state.
Some background on homecare jobs
A little background about homecare jobs is helpful. Employment of homecare aides has grown rapidly over the past decade in New York, particularly since the end of the pandemic. As of 2024, there were 600,000 homecare workers statewide. Some were reported to be working in the home health care industry and some in the individual and family services industry.
Many of these jobs are funded by Medicaid, and the services performed enable elderly and disabled low-income New Yorkers to remain in their homes rather than in more costly nursing homes or other residential care settings. Many, but not all, homecare services are under the Consumer-Directed Personal Assistance Program (CDPAP) that enables participants to hire and direct their own caregivers.
In 2024, in an effort to rein in mounting overhead costs, the State Legislature altered how CDPAP services are managed. During 2025, tasks such as timekeeping and payroll administration were switched from over 600 “fiscal intermediary organizations” to one statewide fiscal intermediary.
This change was accompanied by more precise reporting by the State Department of Health of the industry and location of CDPAP services performed. These reporting changes started to appear in the spring of 2025 (when the new consolidated intermediary system took effect). In the process, the statistical tabulation of jobs in New York City shifted from the home healthcare industry to the individual and family services industry, with the changes roughly offsetting.
But when the benchmark revisions were released, the DOL appears to have reallocated approximately 43,000 home healthcare jobs from New York City to other regions of the state.
This reallocation is purely an administrative artifact and not indicative of an abrupt loss or physical relocation of existing jobs in April 2025. Our analysis of quarterly census data showed that there was a simultaneous net increase of about 43,000 health care and social assistance jobs across all other regions of New York State. That leads us to infer that these shifts were a result of how the State Department of Health is now more accurately reporting to DOL the location of CDPAP homecare services.
Another giveaway that something is wrong in the numbers: The fact that there was no reduction in resident employment in New York City in April 2025. In fact, over the 12 months from February 2025-February 2026, there was a 27,000 increase in resident employment. At a time when overall payroll growth has slowed, it would be surprising to see the loss of 43,000 jobs not reduce the resident employment number.
CNYCA’s revised series results in 22,400 job growth in 2025
The 43,000-job reallocation does reveal that the DOL previously had overstated the magnitude of homecare job growth in New York City (and understated growth in the rest of the state). In light of that, and to get a more realistic view of what has happened in recent years, we now suggest an adjustment method that gradually reduces reported homecare employment growth in New York City from January 2022 through March 2025.
In Figure 1 (below) we approximate this previously overstated employment growth. It depicts an adjusted total private employment trend for New York City back to January 2022 that reflects our moderating the 2022-25 homecare job growth that took place in the home health care and individual and family services industries.
The red line in Figure 1 (below) is our adjusted series; we compare it to the unadjusted series (the yellow line) as reported in the DOL’s benchmark revision. The red line portrays a more accurate picture of private sector job growth in the city, where an administrative change no longer leads to an abrupt decline in home health care jobs.
When the homecare adjustment is incorporated into the overall New York City jobs data, the adjusted series shows a net 22,400 private payroll job gain from December 2024 to December 2025.
Figure 1
Adjusting for the multi-year overstatement in homecare jobs also results in a different understanding of how private job growth in New York City in recent years compares to the rest of the state and the nation (see Figure 2).
For the December 2024 to December 2025 period, the adjusted series shows New York City with 0.9 percent private job growth compared to the DOL-published -0.3 percent falloff. Our adjustment moderates New York City’s reported private sector job growth in 2022, 2023, and 2024 but still shows that New York City’s private job growth outpaced the nation's in 2024. While the city’s private sector job growth was weaker in 2025 than in 2024 (after our adjustments), it was still stronger than national private sector job growth, and slightly ahead of private job growth in the rest of New York State.
Figure 2
What the latest data clarifies about 2025 job growth
Leaving aside how the DOL handled the administrative challenges with homecare jobs, the recent annual benchmark revision provides the clearest snapshot of job growth in 2025.
Figure 3 lists the top 10 industries with the most significant job gains and losses. It compares results from the pre- and post-benchmark process. The DOL’s annual benchmark revision shows stronger growth in sectors like local government, finance, and professional and scientific services than we had previously seen. It also reveals bigger losses in restaurant employment and smaller losses than expected in private colleges and philanthropy.
Figure 3
Our analysis reveals that the city did experience slower private sector job growth in 2025 compared to 2024, but it did not experience a decline in private sector jobs. The usual benchmark revisions reveal more balanced growth than we had seen before.
This is not to suggest that the city is on a strong growth path moving forward. The city’s labor market lost momentum in 2025, with growth concentrated in a small number of industries. The city unemployment and poverty rates are still higher than before the pandemic and slow job growth is a major contributor to the unaffordability crisis. It is imperative that good-quality job growth be priorities for State and City policymakers.
Even after adjusting for the DOL’s administrative change, we find that New York City’s 2026 labor market outlook remains highly uncertain, shaped both by President Trump’s domestic and foreign policy agenda, including the ongoing U.S.–Iran conflict, much higher tariffs, and the accelerating impact of artificial intelligence (AI). The war is expected to push oil and energy prices higher, contributing to rising inflation and slower growth and the possibility of a recession. At the same time, AI is poised to further reshape the labor market and New York City is not immune. According to Goldman Sachs, job displacement due to automation is inevitable, with an estimated six-to-seven percent of U.S. workers affected over the next decade. These factors suggest the city’s labor market, like the country’s, will continue to be characterized by economic instability and structural transformation experienced. Local and state policymakers will need to be resourceful in responding to these global trends.
Note: Benchmarking Jobs
It is a common practice in economic statistics to revise survey data based on more comprehensive census results. The Department of Labor’s annual benchmark revision is intended to be such a routine process. It aligns the monthly Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey of firms with more complete Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) data collected from employers when they pay unemployment insurance payroll taxes. The benchmark process recalibrates the CES with the QCEW so that monthly data releases moving forward better reflect the more comprehensive data on employment levels across industries.