Research & Data
Three of the most white-collar parts of the U.S. economy are producing far more than they did at the end of 2022 with fewer people on their payrolls. Real output in finance and insurance, information, and professional and business services rose about 15.8% from the fourth quarter of 2022 to the second quarter of 2026, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data. Over the same period, combined employment in those industries fell about 2.1%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics payroll data.
JobGetr built this comparison directly from the public BEA and BLS data series, using the same quarters for output and for jobs.
How the numbers were checked
For output, we added up BEA’s real value added for the three industries, measured in chained 2017 dollars at a seasonally adjusted annual rate. That total was about $6.49 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2022 and about $7.51 trillion in the second quarter of 2026, the latest quarter in the data as updated on Sept. 30.
For jobs, we averaged the BLS seasonally adjusted payroll counts for the same quarters. The three industries employed about 32.6 million people in late 2022 and about 31.9 million in the second quarter of 2026, a drop of roughly 670,000. The preliminary September 2026 figure, about 31.87 million, puts the decline at about 2.2%.
Not one story but three
The combined figure hides very different industry paths.
Information, which includes software publishing, telecommunications and data processing, increased real output by about 35% while employment fell about 10.5%, from roughly 3.1 million to 2.78 million.
Finance and insurance increased output by about 16% while employment was nearly flat, down about 0.6%.
Professional and business services, by far the largest employer of the three at about 22.5 million jobs, increased output by about 6.5% while employment fell about 1.3%.
So the headline divergence comes mostly from information, where output has climbed and payrolls have shrunk, and from finance, where output rose without new hiring.
Why it matters for job seekers
For people looking for office jobs, this is a sign that growth in these industries no longer translates into hiring the way it once did. A rising sector does not guarantee openings, and the biggest gap is in information, where employment has fallen about a tenth since late 2022. Openings by occupation, posted pay and employer hiring plans are better guides to where the demand is than industry output figures.
The catch
This is a rough comparison, not an official productivity statistic. Chained-dollar values for different industries are not strictly additive, so the combined output figure is an approximation. Output per job is not the same as BLS labor productivity, which accounts for hours worked. The result also depends on the endpoints chosen: measured from the second quarter of 2023 instead, combined output rose about 13%. And the data do not show why output and jobs diverged. AI, software investment, earlier overhiring and cost-cutting could all play a part, and the numbers cannot separate them.
Sources
- Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), from U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Real Value Added by Industry: Finance and Insurance” (RVAFI), updated September 30, 2026. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/RVAFI.txt
- Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), from U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Real Value Added by Industry: Information” (RVAI), updated September 30, 2026. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/RVAI.txt
- Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), from U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Real Value Added by Industry: Professional and Business Services” (RVAPBS), updated September 30, 2026. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/RVAPBS.txt
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “All employees, thousands, finance and insurance, seasonally adjusted” (CES5552000001), accessed October 15, 2026. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES5552000001
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “All employees, thousands, information, seasonally adjusted” (CES5000000001), accessed October 15, 2026. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES5000000001
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “All employees, thousands, professional and business services, seasonally adjusted” (CES6000000001), accessed October 15, 2026. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES6000000001
Featured photo: Rows of office cubicles; location not specified, uploaded to English Wikipedia June 2, 2006. Representative image; not a specific employer named in this article. Photo: Larsinio at English Wikipedia, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). Cropped from the original.
