In January of each year, the researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia calculate new seasonal adjustment factors for the upcoming year for the Nonmanufacturing Business Outlook Survey (NBOS) using data through December of the previous calendar year and publish historical data revisions that incorporate these new seasonal factors.

However, due to atypical volatility at the onset of the pandemic as well as ongoing uncertainty about the pandemic’s impacts on seasonal factors, we treated 2020 and 2021 as additive outliers in calculating new seasonal adjustment factors for 2022. As a result, we have revised the historical NBOS data, but these revisions are minor and reflect updates to the trend-cycle and residual factors from the seasonal adjustment procedure.

Seasonal factors for 2022 are based on the U.S. Census Bureau's Census X-12 program for data through December 2021, where observations from January 2020 through December 2021 were treated as additive outliers.

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