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The U.S. economy added just 50,000 jobs in September, showing how far hiring has dropped off in a labor market that’s been crawling all year.
Unemployment held steady at 4.3%, the highest it’s been in four years. The job gains came in slightly better than August’s pathetic 22,000, but it’s still nowhere near what the economy used to crank out.
This data came straight from the Labor Department’s delayed monthly jobs report, which was pushed back after the U.S. government froze for 43 days, the longest shutdown in history, and the delay came with consequences.
October’s employment data is now gone. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, couldn’t run the household survey it uses to track the unemployment rate, so October’s figures were scrapped completely.
The agency said it’ll combine October and November into one big dump now scheduled for December 16.
Before that blackout even hit, the BLS had already estimated the U.S. created 911,000 fewer jobs between March 2024 and March 2025 than it had originally reported.
Economists expect low hiring to stick around
The slowdown wasn’t a surprise to Sung Won Sohn, a finance and economics professor at Loyola Marymount University.
“The labor market is clearly slowing, the assumption is that the trend is going to continue,” Sung said. “We’re going to be scratching the bottom for a while, but I don’t think we are going into recession.”
The September job figure was pulled from a Reuters survey of economists who expected a slight pickup from August’s low number.
But even that August number, economists argued, was likely pushed down by a seasonal data issue and could be revised upward later.
Still, the general view is that the labor market doesn’t need to be adding much anymore. Between 30,000 to 50,000 jobs a month is now enough to match the working-age population’s pace, a sharp drop from the 150,000 monthly average needed in 2024.
That drop-off is partly blamed on immigration policy.
The flow of immigrants started slowing in Joe Biden’s last year in office and got worse under Trump’s current administration.
That decline in immigration has shrunk the available labor pool, squeezing the job market from the supply side. Meanwhile, unemployment stayed mostly stuck between 4.1% and 4.2% throughout the year, only ticking up slightly in August.
Stephen Stanley, chief U.S. economist at Santander U.S. Capital Markets, tied it all to labor supply. “This strongly suggests that the sagging pace of job growth is mostly, though not entirely, reflecting the shift in labor supply and that the labor market broadly has slackened slightly but not to a substantial degree,” Stephen said.
AI, tariffs, and the Fed are shaping the jobs story
AI is putting fresh pressure on the labor force, especially at the entry-level. Most of the jobs being cut are the ones meant for new graduates, locking many out of their first shot at full-time work.
Economists are calling it jobless growth, where the economy might be expanding, but companies aren’t hiring.
Trump’s trade policies are also being blamed. Business owners, particularly small ones, say the unstable trade environment is making it harder to hire.
That chaos got a spotlight this month as the Supreme Court heard arguments over Trump’s use of tariffs, with justices questioning whether the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act gave him the right to impose them.
Brian Bethune, an economics professor at Boston College, said smaller companies are taking the brunt of it. “The environment is particularly detrimental to small and medium-sized enterprises; that’s where we’ve seen most of the employment losses,” Brian said. “This is a highly polarized economy.”
September’s numbers could still matter for the Federal Reserve’s December 9–10 meeting, depending on how things look closer to then.
The Fed won’t even have November’s job report in time, since it got delayed to December 16. That puts pressure on September’s data to tell the story.
Minutes from the Fed’s October 28–29 meeting show policymakers are getting nervous about cutting interest rates again. Many warned that doing so could ruin their fight against inflation.
Martha Gimbel, executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale, said, “The Fed is itchy about cutting further. If you see a really weak report, that might move the Fed, but it would take a pretty weak report.”
That weak report might already be here. And if not, we’re getting closer.
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