Two things people feel more than GDP: whether jobs are being added, and whether a paycheck keeps up with prices. Both are shown here, and both come with the same warning that applies to the site's other economic charts: the Federal Reserve, the business cycle, globalization, and technology drive these far more than any president does. Where a term begins in the cycle matters most of all, which is why the jobs panel needs its footnotes read alongside its bars.
Net jobs added (or lost) during each term, in millions of nonfarm payroll jobs. Left of the line means jobs were lost.
Trump I ended with a net loss only because the pandemic erased ~22 million jobs in two months; before COVID he was about +6.7M (dashed). Biden's gain is largely those jobs returning, not net new ones.
Real (inflation-adjusted) hourly pay for typical workers, 1990–2025, in constant dollars.
Why wages feel stuck even when they rise
Real wages did grow: typical hourly pay in constant dollars is up roughly a quarter since 1990, and in 2025 it sits a few points above where it was before the pandemic. But two things muddy the picture. The 2020 spike is a statistical artifact: when millions of low-wage service workers were laid off, the average of those still working jumped, then “fell” as they came back, not real raises and real cuts. And in 2021–22, inflation outran pay: paychecks grew in dollars but shrank in what they bought, before recovering as inflation cooled. The deeper reason wages “feel stuck” is the long divergence from productivity: since 1979, the economy's output per hour has grown about 90% while a typical worker's pay grew only about 34%: pay rose barely more than a third as fast as the work produced.
These are outcomes, not presidential dials. Job creation and wages are driven by the Federal Reserve, the business cycle, globalization, technology, and demographics far more than by the White House, and where in the cycle a term begins dominates the jobs bars: Obama and Biden inherited crises and got large recoveries, while Bush and Trump I ended in the 2008 crash and the 2020 pandemic. That is why Trump I's bar is shown with its pre-COVID figure, and why Biden's total is mostly rehired jobs rather than net-new ones. The jobs numbers use the standard month-to-month payroll convention and are subject to large revisions, a benchmark revision straddling the 2025 handover erased roughly a million jobs. “Real wages” also depend on the choice of measure (average versus median, all workers versus production workers) and the inflation gauge used; the 2020–21 figures are distorted by the layoff-composition effect noted above. Trump II is a partial term, and its early job growth has been notably weak.