On November 6, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that employers added a net 165,000 jobs in October and that the unemployment rate fell to 4.1%. Net means jobs gained minus jobs lost; every jobs number in this story is a net number. Like every first report, that number is an estimate, and it will change.
Since January 2023, the first monthly reports have added up to 7.83 million net new jobs. After the government's own corrections, the count for those same months is 4.95 million, which is 2.88 million fewer. In 2025, the first reports showed 1.21 million net new jobs. The corrected count is 116,000.
How many net new jobs?
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Net means jobs gained minus jobs lost. "After fixing" is the latest count after the monthly corrections and the yearly check against tax records. October 2026 has only its first report.
How the first number is made
The BLS builds the first number from a survey of employers. When the September number came out, about 53% of the employers in the sample had answered. For businesses too new to be in the survey, and for ones that have closed, the BLS uses an estimate called the birth-death model. The BLS changed that model in January 2026, and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in 2025 that it had been overcounting jobs.
The next two monthly reports revise each first number. Every February, the BLS checks the past year against unemployment-insurance tax records that cover nearly every employer. The months from April 2025 on have not been through that check yet. The preliminary check for April 2025 to March 2026 points to about 79,000 fewer jobs.
Layoffs and hiring
The monthly jobs number is the net: what is left after hires and job losses cancel out. The BLS job turnover survey counted 1.64 million people laid off or fired in September 2026 alone, and 5.40 million people hired. A widely reported layoff total, from the firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, is 617,000 for all of 2026 so far, because it counts only cuts that companies announce publicly.
Where the jobs are
In 2025, the whole economy added a net 116,000 jobs, and health care alone added a net 693,000. All other industries combined lost a net 577,000, which is why the total for the year is far smaller than the health care gain alone. From April 2025 to April 2026, health care added a net 618,000 jobs and all other industries together lost a net 367,000, according to Indeed Hiring Lab's reading of BLS data.
Who is out of work
In October, 7.1 million people were unemployed. 2.0 million of them had been out of work for 27 weeks or more, 27.6% of all unemployed. Another 4.8 million were working part time because they could not find full-time work, up 339,000 in one month. The BLS's broadest unemployment rate, which counts those groups, was 7.9%. For college graduates ages 22 to 27, unemployment was 5.6% in March 2026, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Paychecks
After rising prices, average hourly pay was 0.7% lower in September 2026 than a year earlier, according to the BLS. For production and nonsupervisory workers, it was 0.6% lower.
The agency
The BLS ended its 2025 fiscal year with about 20% fewer staff than the year before, according to a December 2025 report on federal statistical agencies. It cut back price collection for the inflation report in 2025, and the administration's 2026 budget proposed cutting its funding for jobs and inflation data by about 8%. In June 2026, the Government Accountability Office reported that falling survey response rates are a risk to the accuracy of the jobs report. From August 2025 to August 2026, the agency was run by an acting commissioner; the timeline below shows who ran it, and when.
What comes next
The December 4 report revises October for the first time. The side-by-side numbers below show each part of this story in one place, and the timeline at the end shows every month since January 2023.