In September, the U.S. labor market showed little movement overall, with unemployment holding steady while both hiring and layoff rates slowed, according to new reports released Thursday.

The Chicago Federal Reserve’s recently developed set of labor indicators placed the national unemployment rate at 4.34%, almost unchanged from August. This figure sits just a fraction below 4.4%, which would mark the highest level of joblessness since October 2021.

The Fed’s regional office introduced its own labor market dashboard last month, tracking trends in both layoffs and hiring. The layoff rate stayed relatively stable at 2.1%, while the hiring rate edged down to 45.2%, a drop of 0.4 percentage points from the previous month.

Meanwhile, a separate report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas revealed that layoff announcements fell sharply—down 37% from August and 26% lower than the same month last year. Despite that short-term improvement, the broader picture is less optimistic: the total number of job cut plans announced so far in 2025 has reached 946,426, the highest since the pandemic year of 2020. That total already exceeds all of 2024 by 24%.

Hiring plans at the weakest level since 2009

Challenger’s report also pointed to a major slowdown in hiring activity. U.S. companies have announced only 204,939 new hires so far this year, a staggering 58% drop compared with the same period in 2024. This is the weakest hiring pace since 2009, when the country was still recovering from the global financial crisis.

“Periods with job cuts at this scale have typically aligned with economic recessions,” said Andy Challenger, the firm’s senior vice president. “In other cases, like 2005 and 2006, they reflected early waves of automation that reshaped the manufacturing and technology sectors.”

These data releases help fill in the gaps left by federal sources, which normally provide a steady flow of labor market statistics. However, with the ongoing government shutdown—now in its second day—key government reports have been delayed. The Department of Labor would typically release weekly jobless claims data on Thursday, and the highly anticipated nonfarm payrolls report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was expected Friday.

For now, economists and Federal Reserve officials must rely on non-government data sources to gauge the health of the job market—a situation that adds another layer of uncertainty to an economy already showing signs of cooling.