Employers cut 23,000 positions on a seasonally adjusted basis last month, the Labor Department reported on Friday. The unemployment rate dropped slightly to 4.1% The underlying details were worse than the headlines suggest.
The economy added 172,000 jobs in May, more than economists had expected. The unemployment rate stayed at 4.3%. With revisions, March and April added 93,000 more jobs than previously reported. That puts average job growth in 2026 at about 114,000 per month, much stronger than the 10,000 average last year. That’s much faster than the rate at which people have been coming into the labor market because the Trump administration has squeezed net immigration to near zero.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday that employers had added 178,000 jobs last month, substantially more than economists had expected. The unemployment rate dropped to 4.3%.
Payrolls were up 50,000 last month and the unemployment rate ticked down a tenth to 4.4% from November’s revised rate of 4.5%. Revisions to payroll growth were negative, with combined October and November totals marked down 78,000. Over the past three months, overall monthly gains have averaged a loss of 22,000 jobs, due to federal government job losses. The private sector jobs market isn’t a whole lot stronger with the comparable average for the private sector at a low 29,000 per month.
Initial claims for unemployment fell last week with initial claims decreasing by 10,000 to 214,000, the Labor Department reported Wednesday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 224,000 initial claims.
Continuing claims, the number of people already receiving benefits, rose to 1.92 million in the previous week,
Initial claims for unemployment rose more than expected last week. Initial claims increased by 44,000 to 236,000 in the week ended December. 6. The figure exceeded all but one estimate in Bloomberg’s survey of economists
Recent college graduates have a growing employment problem. Young college grads (ages 22–27) now face unemployment rates around 4.6 to 5.3%, up from about 3.2 to 3.3% pre‑pandemic, and higher than the overall unemployment rate increase over the same period. The overall national unemployment rate was 4.4% in September, the date of the last unemployment survey report. The recent‑grad unemployment has also risen faster than that for non‑college peers, and degree‑holders now make up a record share of the total unemployed, signaling that the market is absorbing new graduates more slowly than in the past.​ The total unemployment rate for all recent college graduates has climbed from around 3.25% in 2019 to about 4.59% on average in 2025, a much larger rise than for older college grads or non‑college young workers.​ Projections show recent‑grad unemployment reaching roughly 4.8 to 5.8% by mid‑2025, the highest since the early‑2010s outside the pandemic period.​
Layoffs accelerated in October from an already alarming level in September, according to newly released data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a company that tracks workplace reductions. U.S. employers have announced 1.1 million layoffs so far this year–the worst reading since the pandemic recession and on par with 2008 and 2009 job cuts during the Great Recession. The data includes a recent spate of layoffs at major companies such as UPS, Amazon and Target.
The Dot Plot economic projections published by the Federal Reserve yesterday are really an extraordinary document.
Some context on the evening before the 8:30 a.m. ET release of the August jobs report. This begins a two-week period with an extraordinary line-up of potentially economy and market moving events.
At just over a 4% rate, unemployment remains low, and it has edged only a bit higher since the start of the year.
So the economy is doing fine, right?
Well, no. Because the labor force is shrinking. If the labor force had increased this year at the pace it did last year, the unemployment rate would be headed toward 5%,
Trying to figure out the impact of AI on the job market? Look no further than the market for recent college graduates in computer science.
Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1% and 7.5% respectively
