Breakeven Employment Growth: Estimate Range Widens in 2026

The U.S. economy added just 34,000 jobs in January and February combined, according to the most recent employment situation report. How might we know whether the job growth was strong or weak?

In an April 2025 blog post, St. Louis Fed economist Victoria Gregory and I explained the concept of breakeven employment growth, the number of jobs needed each month to hold the unemployment rate steady, and calculated this to be around 153,000 jobs per month. In August 2025, I updated those estimates after immigration projections shifted dramatically during 2025, coming up with a range between 32,000 and 82,000 jobs per month. Now, with new projections for 2026 in hand, it is time for another update: My new estimate is a range between 15,000 to 87,000. This wide range continues to reflect uncertainty about immigration flows, which makes it very hard to pin down a single breakeven growth number for 2026.

What Is Breakeven Employment Growth?

As a quick refresher, breakeven employment growth is the monthly job gain needed to keep the unemployment rate from rising or falling. In a nutshell, the breakeven number depends on how fast the labor force is growing, which reflects both population growth among those ages 16 and older and the labor force participation rate. It turns out that the breakeven growth estimate is actually quite insensitive to gradual changes in the unemployment and labor force participation rates. In terms of population growth, the share of native-born Americans turning 16 each month and mortality rates are fairly predictable, but net immigration is much harder to forecast.

New Projections, Wide Range

Two groups published updated immigration projections in January 2026: a joint team from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Brookings Institution, which released a low and a high scenario, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Their estimates for monthly net immigration in 2026 differ sharply, ranging from a decline of 77,000 people to an increase of 48,000 people. (See the first table below.)

Plugging this wide range of net immigration estimates into the formula that Gregory and I devised for breakeven employment growth, I get a range from 15,000 to 87,000 jobs per month. The upper bound is similar to last year’s number (82,000), but the lower bound dropped substantially from the earlier limit (32,000); the range is now nearly a sixfold spread. Depending on which immigration scenario plays out, the bar for keeping the unemployment rate stable could be quite low or fairly high.

This uncertainty is also reflected in the breakeven estimates from the Blue Chip survey published in January: The consensus was 55,000, with the top 10 forecasters averaging 77,000 and the bottom 10 averaging 37,000. My scenario-based estimates largely bracket this professional consensus.

For context, 2026 payroll employment growth came in at 126,000 in January and -92,000 for February, while the unemployment rate ended up being the same in February 2026 as in December 2025. Readings for both months fall outside the range of my breakeven estimate, though in opposite directions.

But a given month’s reading, especially a first release subject to revision, should not be overinterpreted. The breakeven estimate is best evaluated as a benchmark over several months. Averaging the two months yields monthly growth of around 17,000, which would be consistent with my estimate under the lower AEI-Brookings scenario. Whether that reflects the true state of the labor market depends heavily on where immigration actually lands, which brings us to a sobering lesson from 2025.

Lesson from 2025: Projecting Immigration Flows Is Genuinely Difficult

The CBO and the AEI-Brookings forecasting team significantly revised their 2025 immigration estimates between their initial projections and their update in January 2026.

The CBO’s initial projection of an increase of 175,000 immigrants per month for 2025 was revised down to just 34,000, an 81% drop. The AEI-Brookings high scenario, initially a modest positive, was revised to essentially zero. These large revisions are not a criticism of the forecasters; projecting immigration flows is genuinely difficult, and it becomes even harder when policies change rapidly and real-time data on who is entering or leaving the country are largely unavailable.

However, even the revised 2025 estimates differ considerably from one another. This again reflects not only the lack of real-time data but also the fact that some immigration flows simply go unrecorded. Examples include undocumented immigrants who enter the country without interacting with authorities, or legal immigrants—including green-card holders and naturalized citizens—who return to their home countries with no requirement to report their departure.

Using an Alternative Method to Estimate Immigration

As an independent cross-check, one can work backward from observed employment data. Using CBO estimates for native population growth and employment-to-population ratios for natives and immigrants from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey, I can back out the level of net immigration implied by actual employment growth in 2025.

That calculation yields a net decline of approximately 67,000 immigrants per month, more negative than any of the revised 2025 estimates from the previously mentioned forecasters. While this back-of-the-envelope figure could overstate the decline if some immigrants simply stopped working in the formal economy rather than leaving the country, it points in the same direction as the downward revisions.

Separate research on unauthorized immigration by Daniel Wilson and Xiaoqing Zhou—economists at the San Francisco and Dallas Feds, respectively—also found a sharp and accelerating decline. They estimated net unauthorized immigration turned negative in early 2025, and that it would reach a net decline of 89,000 per month by July 2026. Since unauthorized immigrants represent one component of total net immigration, this is consistent with the broader pattern, though the two concepts are not directly comparable.

What This Means for Reading the 2026 Jobs Reports

The wide range of breakeven employment growth estimates does not make the concept less useful; it just means the benchmark carries uncertainty that is worth keeping in mind. What we can say is that the early evidence for 2026 more likely points toward the lower end of my range rather than the upper end.

There is a real possibility that net immigration in 2026 could fall even below the AEI-Brookings low scenario. If that happens, the employment growth needed to hold the unemployment rate steady would be lower than any of my published estimates, meaning that small job gains may be fully consistent with a healthy labor market. Put differently, when evaluating monthly jobs numbers, it is worth asking not just how the figure compares to those in recent months, but also what it might tell us about underlying immigration trends.