On this particular Friday, at 8:30 a.m. ET, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was supposed to release the September jobs report.
Instead, the agency behind the market-moving release — data that has starkly become even more important, given economic uncertainty — is almost entirely dark due to the federal shutdown. There will be no more employment data until the government is funded again.
In the absence of official data, a constellation of previously reported federal data, private metrics, economists’ analyses, Federal Reserve indicators and job seekers’ lived experiences can help cobble together a rough snapshot of the current US labor market.
Here’s a look at what we know — and what we don’t.
Consensus estimates, according to financial data firm FactSet, are that the economy added 50,000 jobs in September, a pickup from August’s preliminary 22,000-job gain, and the unemployment rate held pat at 4.3%.
Baked in to that estimate was an expectation that private-sector firms would add 62,000 jobs while the government (primarily the federal sector) would post a 12,000-job loss.
Wage growth and the average workweek (a metric watched to gauge whether hours are being cut) were expected to be unchanged from August, when pay gains rose 0.3% monthly and 3.7% annually and the average workweek was 34.2 hours.
“We’ve seen the story last year, where you had a very weak summer of hiring and then hiring picked up again a bit in September,” Brett Ryan, senior US economist at Deutsche Bank, told CNN this week. “I expect something similar, but not nearly as much of a bounce-back as last year.”
In September 2024, the US added 240,000 jobs — a robust increase that pretty much matched the entire gains of June, July and August (when job growth averaged 82,000 per month).
Hiring is considerably weaker this year. During the past three months, job growth has averaged 29,333 jobs per month. The makeup of the US labor force also has changed.
The US unemployment rate can hold steady even the country adds fewer jobs than last year, economists say, noting more people aging out of the workforce, a rise in discouraged job seekers, a reduced flow of immigrants and rising deportations of workers.
“Last year, it probably took about 130,000 (jobs) per month to keep the unemployment rate steady; this year, it’s probably more like 50,000 or below,” Ryan said.
It’s still not clear how much of the recent labor market slowdown can be attributed to lower immigration, JPMorgan economist Abiel Reinhart wrote earlier this week, noting a sudden loss of such labor could boost openings in affected industries.
The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey report for August, which was released on Tuesday, showed that construction job openings were nearly halved, plunging by 115,000 roles — the second-largest drop on record.
“This could also reflect underlying business challenges in that sector,” Reinhart noted.
Construction, which is closely watched as an indicator of economic activity, has been dogged by a combination of high interest rates, a persistent housing affordability crisis, deportations of workers and tariff-related uncertainty.
The foreign-born labor force has declined after peaking earlier this year, BLS data shows. However, the drop-off could also be attributed to people refusing to answer surveys or not indicating their nativity status, economists note.
Even without the official September jobs data, industry-specific trends that showed up in the August report and for much of this year are expected to continue.
Health care, which has contributed the lion’s share of overall job growth this year, likely continued driving employment gains in September.
Here’s what the industry breakdown looked like in August:
“Health care has been one of the stalwarts of the labor market … the need for health care has grown as the population ages,” Nela Richardson, chief economist at payroll giant ADP, said Wednesday. “About 10,000 individuals turn retirement age every day in the United States; that adds up to about 4 million retirements every year.”
ADP’s monthly snapshot of private-sector employment, which was released Wednesday, showed that health services and education added the most jobs in September, as employment slumped elsewhere. ADP estimated that private-sector businesses lost 32,000 jobs in September because of ongoing uncertainty as well as a preliminary data revision.
In a low-hire, low-fire market with few options for workers — especially those in white-collar industries — health care is becoming an attractive option.
Sarah Loyd, a single mother with two degrees, has been in and out of the labor force for the past four years. Jobs have been increasingly harder to come by in her field of marketing.
“I’m sending out emails to schools now to get back into school to pivot into health care — just to find any semblance of stability,” Loyd, 35, told CNN.
Still, the lack of broad-based employment gains makes the US even more vulnerable to a shock, economists warn.
Months and months to find work
Hiring activity has been listless this year, and the latest data isn’t showing much of a turnaround.
In September, a month when businesses’ job boards are typically filled with seasonal postings, hiring announcements were the weakest in more than a decade, according to new data Thursday from Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Layoff activity thankfully doesn’t seem to be accelerating, but those who are unemployed are having a really hard time getting back into the workforce.
Continuing jobless claims, which are submitted by people who have filed for at least a week or more of unemployment, have been hovering at around four-year highs, Department of Labor data shows.
And in the August jobs report, 25.7% of unemployed people were actively job seeking for at least 27 weeks. Outside of the pandemic years, that’s the highest share for that duration since June 2016, BLS data shows.
Among the bevy of regional Fed data, a new index from the Chicago Fed indicated similar unemployment activity as seen in August.
The Chicago Fed Real-Time Unemployment Rate Forecast, updated this week, projected an unemployment rate of 4.34% for September (up a hair from 4.32% in August); a rate of 2.1% for layoffs and other separations (roughly unchanged from 2.09%); and a rate of 45.22% for hiring of unemployed workers (a slip from 45.61%).
A separate new indicator from the San Francisco Fed showed that state-level unemployment is still largely under control.
As of mid-September, only seven states’ unemployment rates increased at least 0.5 percentage points above their prior 12-month lows, according to the Weekly Labor Market Stress Indicator.
The current suite of non-federal labor market data paints a mixed picture, but one with some bright spots.
For example, ZipRecruiter’s recent employer surveys support the longstanding idea that there is pent-up demand just simmering beneath the surface.
“All of these data points say that the majority of businesses plan to increase hiring in the next 12 months, which is encouraging,” Nicole Bachaud, ZipRecruiter’s labor economist, told CNN.
On main street America, the September employment trends — including workforce participation, hours worked and wages — are generally in line with where they’ve been in recent years, said Raymond Sandza, vice president of analytics and data at small business payroll company Homebase.
At a time when economic anxiety is high, stable’s not too shabby.
“There’s nothing stark, nothing out of the ordinary,” Sandza said. “That said, things have not felt great for Main Street for the last three or four years. There was no post-Covid boom time for them, it’s just always been hard.”
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