Every month, the BLS releases two job reports. The Nonfarm Payroll Report generates all the headlines and gets the most attention. The second report which gets much less fanfare is the Household Survey. The plot below shows both reports.

As shown, the Household report had been significantly lower than the Headline Report going back to April of this year. December flipped that in a big way with the Household report showing 3.2x more jobs than the Headline Report (717k vs 223k).

December was the biggest deviation since October 2020. It cannot be explained by holiday hiring as last December saw the Household survey at 93% of the Headline Report.

Even the massive deviation in December 2022 will rank as the biggest discrepancy (70.2%) between the two reports since 2013 (63%). Typically, the Household Survey ranges from 85%-120% when compared to the Headline Report.