Delayed jobs report hits mark, but unemployment ticks up
Nick Rummell
MANHATTAN (CN) — The U.S. economy added 64,000 jobs last month, according to government data released on Tuesday, but the employment rate is slowly creeping upward.
Delayed by a few weeks and including some data from October, the November jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was a hair above the roughly 50,000 jobs most analysts had predicted. However, the number is well below the 227,000 jobs added in November 2024 and marks the seventh consecutive month jobs came in under 150,000.
Potentially worse, the unemployment rate ticked up once again to hit 4.6%, compared with the 4.5% rate most experts forecast. The unemployment rate has crept up steadily from 4.1% since June.
The Labor Department was unable to collate household survey data for October’s report because of the government shutdown, which affected the overall unemployment number. However, the agency did include some of its employer surveys from October in the latest report.
Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at One Point BFG Wealth Partners, wrote in an investor’s note there was “a lot of confusion here, but it’s hard to ignore the rise in the unemployment rate and that about all of the job gains came from health care/social assistance.”
Health care and construction saw the main increases, with the former adding 46,000 jobs and the latter netting 28,000. Predictably, given government layoffs earlier this year, public employment continued its downward trend to lose 6,000 jobs last month and 162,000 jobs in October.
Downward revisions to the August and September jobs reports lowered those two reports by 33,000 jobs. The August report, which was already in negative territory, now sits at a 26,000-job decline, while September’s 119,000 jobs gained was dinged to 108,000 jobs added.
The surprise September gains were all but wiped out, however, as BLS’s partial data for October showed a 105,000-job loss for that month. In a note, BLS warned the November 2025 job estimates were “associated with slightly higher than usual standard errors” due to lower survey responses, relying on two months of data and composite weighting changes.
Nancy Vanden Houten, lead economist at Oxford Economics, wrote before the release that revisions likely would be smaller than usual because the BLS had more time to conduct its surveys. The agency continues to collect data from its employer survey — one of two that comprise the jobs report — to get a more accurate picture of the labor pool.
Compared with last week’s private sector jobs report from payroll company ADP — which showed a drop of 32,000 jobs in October, entirely from small companies — the federal jobs report is good news.
The BLS numbers also highlight last week’s JOLTS report, which showed a higher layoff rate but also more job openings. That report included data from September and October due to the shutdown-related delay.
The next federal jobs report for December’s data is scheduled to be released on the first Friday of January, back to the agency’s usual schedule.