Which Presidents Created the Most Jobs?

A president’s jobs number is the change in jobs between two months, and three choices move it: the survey, the months, and whether government jobs are counted.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) runs two monthly surveys. Its payroll survey of employers counts jobs, so a person with two jobs is counted twice. It leaves out agricultural workers, the unincorporated self-employed, unpaid family workers and private household workers. The household survey includes them and counts each employed person once.

This page uses the payroll survey, which gives the monthly change in payroll jobs in BLS’s Employment Situation release. BLS says the two measures “track well over the long term” but that “periodic divergences occur”.

The months chosen also change the total. This page counts from the month each president took office to the month the term ended, so most terms run from January to January. Starting Barack Obama’s count at the payroll low of February 2010, instead of January 2009, adds 4.4 million jobs to it. Ending Donald Trump’s first-term count in February 2020, before the pandemic, turns a loss of 2.8 million into a gain of 6.7 million.

Government jobs are part of the total: 23.3 million in September 2026, 20.6 million of them in state and local government. Private and government jobs can move apart. Over Obama’s two terms, private payrolls grew by 11.8 million while government payrolls fell by 263,000.

A total also needs a yardstick: the monthly job gain that keeps the unemployment rate from rising or falling. Estimates of it swing with assumptions about immigration. Two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis put it at about 153,000 a month in April 2025. One of them, Alexander Bick, put it at 15,000 to 87,000 a month for 2026.

In the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) payroll series, which begins in 1939, presidents’ totals run from a loss of 2.8 million jobs to a gain of 22.9 million. The loss came in Donald Trump’s first term, the only one that ended with fewer jobs than it began with. The 22.9 million came in Bill Clinton’s two terms, more than in any other presidency. Ronald Reagan’s 16.1 million and Joe Biden’s 15.4 million come next.

As a share of the jobs that existed when they took office, though, Lyndon Johnson’s gain and Harry Truman’s were slightly larger than Clinton’s. Franklin Roosevelt’s 38.5% is larger, but it is counted from January 1939, when the series begins, not from when he took office.

Biden’s 15.4 million is the largest gain of any single four-year term in the series. The next largest is Clinton’s first term, at 11.6 million. Biden took office with payrolls 9.4 million below their February 2020 peak, and left with them 6.0 million above it.

Trump’s second term added 776,000 jobs in its first 20 months. That is 39,000 a month, the slowest pace of any presidency in the table without a recession so far. Government payrolls fell by 230,000 over those months. Over the same months the unemployment rate rose from 4.0% to 4.2%.

Three things limit what a president controls: policy acts with a delay, the Federal Reserve sets short-term interest rates, and shocks such as the pandemic strike whoever is in office.

Monetary policy acts slowly. Central bankers speak of its “long and variable lags”, a term coined by the economist Milton Friedman. Friedman found that monetary policy’s effect arrived between 4 and 29 months after a policy action, as a St. Louis Fed economist summarized his work in 2023. He found that range across 18 business cycles.

In the study described below, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, economists at Princeton, allow for a delay before a new president can affect the economy. They charge the first quarter of each term to the president before.

The Federal Reserve (the Fed), not the president, sets short-term interest rates. Congress structured it to be “independent within the government”, the San Francisco Fed explains. Presidents appoint its seven governors with the Senate’s consent, but the appointments are staggered and the terms last 14 years.

For example, the recession that began six months into Ronald Reagan’s first term was triggered by tight monetary policy, aimed at inflation, after the federal funds rate approached 20 percent. It lasted from July 1981 to November 1982. Federal Reserve History records what happened when the Fed let the rate fall back to 9 percent. The unemployment rate dropped from nearly 11 percent at the end of 1982 to 8 percent a year later.

The pandemic shows how a shock can swamp a term. Payrolls fell by 21.9 million in March and April 2020, more than any president’s whole-term gain except Clinton’s.

The three largest totals since 1981, Clinton’s, Reagan’s and Biden’s, all began with the unemployment rate above 6%.

Reagan’s total includes the 1981–82 recession and the recovery after it: payrolls grew 10.9% in the three years after the recession ended in November 1982. The unemployment rate fell from 7.5% when he took office to 5.4% when he left. He is the only Republican president since the rate’s series began in 1948 to leave it lower than he found it.

George H. W. Bush’s term included the recession of July 1990 to March 1991. In March 1991 Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve’s chairman, told Congress that the sudden rise in oil prices had made households cut back their spending in real terms. He added that tighter credit at banks and problems in real estate were holding back activity. Clinton had no recession; the next began in March 2001, two months into George W. Bush’s first term.

George W. Bush’s eight years included the recession of March to November 2001 and most of the one from December 2007 to June 2009. Those dates are the National Bureau of Economic Research’s. Private payrolls fell over the eight years. From December 2007 to February 2010 payrolls fell by 8.7 million, the largest fall in the number of jobs in the series until 2020. When Barack Obama took office in January 2009, they were falling by 768,000 a month.

The 2009 stimulus law was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that it raised the number of people employed by 1.4 million to 3.3 million in the second quarter of 2010. Even so, the recovery was slow: payrolls grew 2.3% in the three years after the recession ended in June 2009, against 10.9% after the 1982 recession ended.

From March 2010, private payrolls rose for 83 months in a row to January 2017, the longest run in the series to that point. State and local governments, by contrast, cut 747,000 jobs from July 2008 to July 2013 and had regained 449,000 by January 2017.

Donald Trump inherited an expansion. Payrolls grew by 180,000 a month from January 2017 to February 2020, slower than the 224,000 a month of Obama’s last three years. The unemployment rate fell to 3.5% in September 2019, the lowest since 1969, and the rates for Black and Hispanic workers reached record lows at the time. Then the pandemic struck, and payrolls ended his term 2.8 million below where they began.

Joe Biden took office during the recovery from the pandemic. In February 2021 the Congressional Budget Office projected that, without his proposed relief plan, employment would regain its pre-pandemic level in 2024. Payroll jobs passed it in June 2022, and the household survey’s count of employed people in August 2022. These figures cannot show how much of that faster recovery his American Rescue Plan caused. Prices rose faster than pay: average hourly earnings, adjusted for consumer prices, fell 2.1% in 2021 and 1.4% in 2022, December to December.

Supporters of Republican policy argue that lower tax rates raise the after-tax return on investing and on working. They point to the expansion that began in November 1982 and lasted until July 1990, and to an unemployment rate of 3.5% in September 2019. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, whose staff analyze tax bills, estimated that the 2017 tax law would raise gross domestic product (GDP) by about 0.7% on average over ten years. It put the rise in employment at about 0.6%, also on average over ten years.

But Reagan’s expansion followed a recession that tight monetary policy had triggered. And job growth under Trump before the pandemic was slower than in the three years before he took office. The Joint Committee on Taxation also estimated that the extra growth would bring in about $451 billion of revenue. That is less than a third of the $1,456 billion the law would otherwise cost over ten years.

Supporters of Democratic policy argue that consumer spending, about two-thirds of GDP, drives hiring, so policies that support incomes support jobs. The Democrats on Congress’s Joint Economic Committee wrote in October 2024 that job growth under the last seven presidents totaled over 50 million under Democrats. They put the total under Republicans at 17 million.

On current Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, with Biden’s term counted to its end in January 2025, those totals are 49.9 million and 17.4 million, so the gap holds. But Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, in the study described below, found that fiscal and monetary policy did not explain the faster growth under Democratic presidents.

Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, economists at Princeton, published a study of economic performance under Democratic and Republican presidents in the American Economic Review in 2016. It covers the 16 presidential terms from Harry Truman’s elected term to Barack Obama’s first, so it ends before Trump and Biden took office.

The gaps in GDP growth, payroll job growth and the change in the unemployment rate are statistically significant; the smaller gap in the household survey’s count is not. A significant gap is one that, by the usual test, is unlikely to arise by chance.

In their analysis, Blinder and Watson attribute none of the faster growth under Democratic presidents to fiscal or monetary policy. In their abstract, they write that “it appears that the Democratic edge stems mainly from more benign oil shocks, superior total factor productivity (TFP) performance, a more favorable international environment, and perhaps more optimistic consumer expectations about the near-term future”.

Their conclusion lists oil shocks, productivity, defense spending (if the Korean War is counted) and, more tenuously, growth abroad. Over the whole period, these explain up to 56 percent of the gap in GDP growth. Blinder and Watson add that “the rest remains, for now, a mystery”. They write that some, maybe all, of these factors “might be considered blends of good policy and good luck”.

Bill Clinton, on the usual count. His eight years added 22.9 million payroll jobs, the largest gain under any president since the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) payroll series began in 1939. Biden’s 15.4 million is the largest in a single term. The order changes with the measure. As a share of the jobs that existed when they took office, Johnson’s and Truman’s gains were slightly larger than Clinton’s. Counted only to February 2020, Trump’s first term shows a gain of 6.7 million.

The totals record what happened during each term more than what each president did. A policy’s effects arrive with a delay, short-term interest rates are the Federal Reserve’s to set, and the pandemic cut 21.9 million jobs in two months. Blinder and Watson’s study of 1949 to 2013 found faster growth under Democrats but attributed none of it to fiscal or monetary policy.

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The verdict above as one image, with bars for the four largest gains in payroll jobs under a president since 1939. Clinton’s was 22.9 million and Reagan’s 16.1 million. Biden’s was 15.4 million and Johnson’s 12.2 million. The image is 1,200 by 630 pixels, the size social networks use for link previews, and anyone may download it and post it.

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