It might feel odd to spend the first Friday of the month without poring over the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) jobs report — but rest assured, you didn’t miss much this time.

With Washington’s partial government shutdown leaving the BLS data dark, a cluster of non-government sources stepped in to fill the void. And what these alternate measures suggest is that the U.S. labor market in September remained sluggish — but far from collapse.

Alternate data paints a cautious picture

Financial analysts expected nonfarm payrolls to grow by 51,000, with the unemployment rate holding steady at 4.3 percent. That estimate, derived from the Dow Jones consensus, assumed a continuation of weak but stable employment momentum.

In lieu of official numbers, high-frequency indicators — such as private payrolls, job-posting statistics, and state-level claims data — offer clues about labor market trends. Those signals suggest that while job growth has cooled, the labor market is still hanging in there.

“We fight with the army we have at moments like this, where it’s critically important that we’re figuring out whether the economy is in a moment of transition,” said Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee in a CNBC interview. “This is what we have, and thus far it still continues to point to a pretty stable labor market.”

Goolsbee’s remarks speak to the challenge: economists are forced to read the tea leaves without the standard BLS tools. In fact, the Chicago Fed recently launched its own dashboard to cover core labor metrics — unemployment, hiring, and layoffs — to help fill in the gaps left by the BLS’s silence.

Unchanged unemployment rate, with a caveat

According to the alternate metrics, the unemployment rate held at 4.3 percent. A slight nudge of one or two hundredths of a point higher would have pushed it to 4.4 percent — the highest level since October 2021 — yet still within historically modest territory.

Other non-government sources mirror this flatness. Job postings, for example, have declined; in late September, Indeed reported an 8.9 percent drop from a year earlier. That’s steeper than the 5.5 percent decline shown by BLS data (the latter only through August). These numbers point to softening conditions: fewer open positions, slower hiring, more competition for jobs.

Yet even under these more difficult conditions, employers seem loath to shed staff. The experience of the COVID era — when mass layoffs were followed by an enormous scramble to refill roles — still looms large in corporate memory. Maintaining headcount, even if expansion slows, may feel safer than allowing attrition.

“A lot of the new entrants in the market — young workers, recent graduates, people who are already unemployed — are having a hard time getting into the market,” said Cory Stahle, senior economist at Indeed. “Regardless of what the unemployment rate is, people taking longer to find jobs is a sign of some economic distress for some households.”

Labor market imbalances and sector divergence

A deeper look suggests the cooling isn’t uniform across industries. Indeed’s data point to a notable drop in job postings across most sectors, but jobs in health care remain a bright spot. Meanwhile, fields like software and tech appear relatively weak.

“Overall, things are looking pretty good, but a lot of those job gains, a lot of those postings and hiring, are coming from health care,” Stahle noted. “It’s hard to say the labor market is fully in balance when it’s not providing equal opportunities across different occupations.”

This divergence is reflected in historical BLS statistics too: openings have skewed toward health care, business and professional services, leisure and hospitality, with government jobs retreating since early in the Trump administration.

“If you’re a nurse, right now is a good time. If you’re a software developer, that’s a harder story,” Stahle added. “That labor market bifurcation is as meaningful to watch as the headline balance.”

Other indicators echo the unevenness. ADP’s private payroll report for September showed a drop of 32,000 jobs, and even August was revised into negative territory with a 3,000 decline. While ADP’s numbers have sometimes misaligned with BLS data in the past, they’ve gained more attention since they foreshadowed BLS’s own eventual downward revision.

Meanwhile, the upheaval of the shutdown also disrupted ADP’s counterpart metric: weekly initial jobless claims. With official labor department figures offline, Goldman Sachs estimated that state filings point to roughly 224,000 initial claims — slightly higher than the prior week, but within the usual range for the year.

Beyond payrolls: spending and business data

Payrolls and jobless claims only tell part of the story. Consumer spending and small business activity provide indirect but invaluable insight into how employment trends resonate throughout the economy.

Bank of America’s card-spending tracker showed that total debit and credit card outlays had climbed 2.2 percent year over year as of the week ending September 27. That suggests consumers continued to spend — or at least not tighten up dramatically — even in the face of labor softness.

“At present, spending growth remains solid in spite of soft labor data. We will continue to monitor this divergence,” said BofA economist Shruti Mishra.

Likewise, Fiserv’s small business index recorded a 2.3 percent annual increase in sales and transactions in September, matching growth from prior months. These figures point to modest but steady activity at the grassroots level.

But not every small business indicator is holding up. The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) warns that many firms have open positions, but few jobs are actually being filled. “There are a lot of firms that have job openings. Unfortunately, very few of them get filled,” said NFIB Chief Economist Bill Dunkelberg. “So plans to fill them are always optimistic, but when the dust clears, few jobs actually materialize.”

Interpreting the picture

Putting all the signals together, the weight of evidence suggests that the U.S. labor market in September was in a holding pattern — not booming, not collapsing. The absence of the official BLS numbers made it harder to nail down exact magnitudes or trend shifts, but the proxy data point to moderate softness.

A few takeaways stand out:

• Stability at risk: The slight rise in unemployment to 4.3–4.4 percent is still low in a historical sense, but the trend line is nudging upward. One or two hundredths of a point might not excite headlines, but if that shift continues, it points to slack building in the labor market.
• Sectoral imbalance: The divergence between health care (strong) and technology or white-collar sectors (weaker) underscores an uneven recovery — it’s not a uniform softening.
• Pent-up drag: Many firms remain reluctant to let go of staff, perhaps haunted by past hiring bottlenecks. But reluctance to cut doesn’t guarantee hiring will persist — many posted jobs are going unfilled.
• Consumption robustness: Moderate consumer spending and business activity offer a counterpoint to labor softness. In effect, the real economy is muddling through, aided by continued household cash flow.
• Fragile confidence: Because we’re missing the BLS’s monthly “anchor,” analysts must rely on proxies — and that introduces more uncertainty. As Goolsbee implied, these are imperfect tools in a moment when precision matters.

What to watch going forward

Now that the BLS is offline, markets and economists will lean more heavily on alternative indicators. Expect greater scrutiny of:

1. State unemployment filings and claims — the basis for national estimates.
2. Private payroll reports from firms like ADP and other payroll processors.
3. Online job postings and corporate hiring dashboards (Indeed, LinkedIn, etc.).
4. Consumer spending trends, especially via card data and point-of-sale metrics.
5. Business surveys from small and mid-size firms showing intent to hire and actual hiring outcomes.

If the BLS were to resume publishing in the coming months, those numbers will either validate or upend the current patchwork narrative. But for now, the labor market appears to be in a “floating neutral” stance — not surging, not collapsing.

In short: You didn’t miss much from a macro perspective. The labor market continues to tread water — and we’ll need fresh data to determine whether it can muster forward momentum again.