The Bureau of Labor Statistics is estimating that there are significantly more workers in the Transportation & Warehousing sector this year than the base model it has been using for its 2026 employment reports.

In its preliminary benchmark revisions report released Friday, the BLS said there were 135,100 more workers in Transportation & Warehousing in March 2026 — the baseline for its report — than it had assumed for this year.

The benchmark process is a routine annual exercise: each year the BLS compares its payroll survey–based employment estimates against more complete counts drawn from state unemployment insurance tax records, then reanchors its model to those counts. Because the survey-based figures are estimates, the annual revision is the primary mechanism for correcting cumulative drift between what the monthly reports showed and actual payroll counts.

That is a 2% difference from the existing model, the second-largest adjustment in any category, whether up or down. The Information sector is up 3%, while the largest decline was in Wholesale Trade, down 1.4%.

According to the benchmark numbers in the report, total private employment is 178,000 jobs less than the current model figures, while government jobs are 99,000 jobs fewer. The overall estimate is therefore 79,000 fewer jobs than is currently used in the model — the smallest downward revision in three years.

https://twitter.com/JohnHKingston/status/2093358229879230601

The good folks at @The_Budget_Lab have provided downloadable data on the annual change in the baseline employment model released at this time every year by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The shift for 2026 is relatively moderate, especially after the last two years. pic.twitter.com/0nOo1z5vGM — John Kingston (@JohnHKingston) August 28, 2026

No subsector breakdown

One key aspect the annual BLS revision does not report is the shift among subsectors. There is no estimate of changes in the 2026 model for fields such as truck transportation, rail, or warehousing. Besides those three, the other subsectors under Transportation & Warehousing are air transportation, water transportation, transit and ground passenger transportation, pipeline transportation, scenic and sightseeing transportation, support activities for transportation, and couriers & messengers.

Warehousing and storage has the largest number of jobs among those subsectors, with a reported July figure of 1.835 million. Truck transportation was second at 1.465 million. The total for the entire sector in July was approximately 6.6 million jobs.

Aaron Terrazas, an independent economist who studies labor markets and has a background in transportation, said last year's downward revision "was the first data canary hinting at a softening labor market — a trend that continued through late 2025 and early 2026."

The big jump in Transportation and Warehousing, Terrazas said, was an "outlier," suggesting slightly stronger payrolls while the data for most other industries suggested softer payrolls.

Given that the specifics of the subsectors are not known, Terrazas said the "accelerating carrier exits" make it unlikely that trucking drove the forecast gains in the larger sector.

"My hunch is that parcel delivery services and perhaps taxi services were the primary drivers of the upward revision," he said in an email to FreightWaves.

Calendar for the rollout

Changes in the model will not show up in the monthly employment report until the January numbers are reported in February. At that point, the preliminary estimates will have been further revised into a final new baseline model.

With that in hand, a comparison of what is in that report with what was originally reported by the BLS will provide insight into how individual sectors contributed to the 135,100 total.

The next employment report will be released Friday, September 4.