Abstract

We document the structural transformation of US nonfarm payroll employment from 1947 through 2026 using monthly FRED data on ten major sector employment series across 952 months. The dominant pattern is the decline of manufacturing as a share of total nonfarm employment, from 28.7% during the postwar period (1947–1972) to 7.9% in 2026—a loss of 20.8 percentage points spread across eight decades. The corresponding gains have been concentrated in three sectors: Education and Health Services (5.4 to 17.5%, +12.1 pp), Professional and Business Services (6.9 to 14.1%, +7.3 pp), and Leisure and Hospitality (6.4 to 10.7%, +4.3 pp). Information sector employment has declined modestly (3.2 to 1.8%), a counterintuitive finding that reflects classification choices and substantial labor productivity gains in publishing and telecommunications. We partition the sample into five regimes—Postwar (1947–1972), Stagflation (1973–1990), Globalization (1991–2007), Post-GFC (2010–2019), Post-COVID (2020+)—and document the regime-by-regime evolution of the sectoral composition. We apply formal sup-F structural-break tests to the manufacturing share series, identifying 1979Q2 as the dominant single break date with sup-F statistic 184.3 (well above the 1% critical value of 12.4). We document the geographic distribution of the manufacturing decline using BEA state-level data, identifying the eight states that account for 60% of the cumulative manufacturing job loss. We discuss implications for management research on firm-level employment trajectories, for the measurement of human capital across sectors, for the demographic distribution of opportunity across the US labor market, and for the strategic positioning of firms in the contemporary US economy.