The US economy added 119,000 jobs in September, but unemployment rose to a nearly four-year high
(CNN) — A long-awaited jobs report offered a mixed picture of the US labor market.
The economy added 119,000 jobs in September, an unexpected rebound for the labor market — but it comes as the overall economy shows signs of slowing.
Economists were expecting 50,000 jobs to have been added and an unemployment rate that remained at 4.3%, according to FactSet.
Delayed for seven weeks due to the government shutdown, the latest snapshot of America’s job market showed that unemployment rose in September to the highest level in nearly four years.
In addition, August’s tepid job gains of 22,000 were revised to a job loss of 4,000 jobs and July was revised down by 7,000 jobs, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Thursday.
The health care and social assistance sector continued to drive overall employment growth. Those sectors added an estimated 57,100 jobs in September, accounting for nearly half of the overall gains. Leisure and hospital contributed 47,000 jobs during a month with unseasonably warm weather.
Jobs were lost in sectors such as transportation and warehousing (-25,300), temporary help services (-15,900) and manufacturing (-6,000).
Although the September employment data has been on the shelf since early October, it provides a critical snapshot of the labor market at a time when tariffs, stubborn inflation and elevated interest rates continue to slow the US economy.
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. The BLS on Wednesday announced that there will not be a separate October jobs report published but instead some of that data will be included in the November report scheduled for December 16.
Despite the stronger-than-expected September gains – bolstered in part by warm weather that supported strong leisure and hospitality employment – this year is still on pace for the weakest employment growth since the pandemic and, before that, the Great Financial Crisis.
This story is developing and will be updated.
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