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| - As the U.S. economy kept on recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, it gained 14.9 million jobs in total. However ...
About 9 million of those jobs were lost during the pandemic, so the net jobs gain from pre-pandemic levels was 5.5 million.
In March 2024, the claim that 15 million jobs had been created since U.S. President Joe Biden took office began to spread.
The claim was repeated by U.S. Department of Commerce, the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Some of them included in their posts that the unemployment rate had stayed below 4% since February 2022, the "longest stretch in more than 50 years." This is what the White House's post on X/Twitter said:
(@WhiteHouse / X)
Harris' post on X (former Twitter) on March 20, 2024, (archived) read: "Nearly 15 million jobs created since President @JoeBiden and I took office."
(@KamalaHarris / X)
It is true that in January 2021, when Biden took office, 142.9 million people were employed, and that number rose to 157.8 million for the month of February 2024, according to preliminary figures from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose figures are revised regularly. This represents an increase of 14.9 million jobs. This number, however, is a bit misleading.
Pre-Pandemic Employment Levels
In February 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic reached the U.S., 152.3 million people were employed. Two months later, that number had dropped by 21.9 million, to 130.4 million. By the time former President Donald Trump left office, more than half of those jobs had been recovered.
It took 17 more months, until June 2022, for the U.S. economy to recover the remaining 9 million jobs lost during the pandemic. From that perspective, the actual net gain during the Biden administration was 5.5 million jobs as of February 2024, not 14.9 million. This is based on our calculations using numbers from the BLS.
Signs of a Strong Economy
The data shows that the U.S. economy has been strong overall under Biden, however. For instance, the government reported that 275,000 jobs had been added to the economy in February 2024 compared to the previous month, a number that surpassed the 200,000 that had been estimated, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, while the unemployment rate rose 0.2 percentage points to 3.9%, it had remained under 4% for two full years, something that hadn't happened since 1967.
Further, the economy grew 3.1% in 2023, a year that 85% of economists in a survey expected would end in a recession. Given these numbers, many at the time of this writing were taking the view that it may take longer than forecast for growth to slow down.
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