Business | Economy • 5 min read

What to expect in Thursday’s jobs report

By Alicia Wallace
1 hr 3 min ago
PUBLISHED Nov 19, 2025, 9:44 AM ET

One of the most hotly anticipated economic reports is finally set to be released Thursday: The long-delayed jobs report for September, originally due on October 3. It marks the reopening of the floodgates for a slew of backlogged economic data that was held up due to the historic government shutdown. ... Sitting on the shelf for six weeks, the months-old data has the potential to come across as stale – especially for a fast-moving economy that is feeling increasingly perilous for many Americans and businesses.

Economic uncertainty and the rising cost of living have caused consumers to pull back (as The Home Depot and Target can attest). Affordability concerns are reaching a fever pitch (so much so that President Donald Trump exempted some grocery store items like coffee, beef and fruit from steep tariffs). ... However, the end of the federal data drought provides a much-needed look at how the economy fared in recent weeks and what’s in store for the months to come.

Plus, Thursday’s report might very well be the last clean jobs report for a couple of months, since the shutdown mucked up the finely tuned process of data collection and analysis during October and part of November. As such, it will provide a critical baseline of the US labor market entering the fourth quarter. ... Economists are expecting 50,000 jobs were added in September and that the unemployment rate held steady at 4.3%, according to FactSet. The consensus estimates would mark a pickup from August’s preliminary 22,000-job gain. ... If September job gains come in as expected at 50,000, they will keep this year on course for the weakest employment growth since the pandemic and, before that, the Great Financial Crisis.

“I’m not expecting huge changes in the (September) report, relative to past reports,” said Allison Shrivastava, economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. “I really just expect this continuation of this anemic job market that we’ve seen.” ... It’s been a low-hire, low-fire slog of a labor market where the lion’s share of job gains has occurred in health care and social services. ... That trend was largely confirmed by a host of private sector labor market data released during the shutdown. ... Still, while economists aren’t expecting many surprises, Thursday’s report doesn’t come without some fairly big risks – especially for the consideration of monetary policy. The Federal Reserve trimmed interest rates by a quarter point on October 29 with a backdrop of a “less dynamic and somewhat softer labor market,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said at the time. ... “Anything that looks kind of ugly now has had the potential to fester for a little bit longer, for the six weeks before we got a better eye on it,” Oliver Allen, senior US economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, told CNN.

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