The rebound hired somewhere else

Nonfarm payrolls grew by 162,000 in August, roughly triple the 53,000 that Dow Jones economists surveyed by CNBC expected. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the August jobs report on Friday, September 4, against an average monthly gain of 31,000 over the prior twelve months. By the payroll count, August delivered more than five times the average month of the past year. By the count that measures a job seeker’s odds, it delivered nothing.

Triple the forecast

Revisions in the same release added to the shine. July flipped from a loss of 23,000 jobs to a gain of 21,000. June moved up to 31,000. Together, 55,000 jobs the earlier estimates missed. Indeed Hiring Lab economist Laura Ullrich notes that three-month average job growth now runs roughly 71,000 a month, up from just over 38,000 as of July.

Where the growth went

Read the sector table and the month narrows. Food services and drinking places added 59,000 jobs, nearly five times their average monthly gain of 12,000 over the prior year. Local government education added 42,000, largely offsetting a decrease the month before; BLS notes the category has shown little net change since January 2025. Pantheon Macroeconomics read the pickup as payback for two very weak months plus the reversal of a seasonal adjustment distortion in education jobs, not a sustainable shift to faster growth.

The engine stalled

Health care averaged 32,000 added jobs a month over the prior twelve months in the BLS data, more than the entire economy’s average monthly gain of 31,000 over the same stretch. In August it added 13,000. Information lost 23,000 jobs against its average monthly loss of 8,000: computing infrastructure, data processing and web hosting cut 8,000, publishing lost 7,000, broadcasting 5,000. Financial activities lost 11,000. The growth came from restaurants and school payrolls. The losses came from offices.

The number that measures odds

A payroll count measures jobs that exist. The hires rate measures the chance of getting one. JOLTS data for July, released September 1, put the hires rate at 3.2 percent, and Indeed Hiring Lab’s Sneha Puri notes it fell 0.2 points to its lowest level since February. Unemployment held at 4.1 percent, with 7.0 million people out of work. Of those, 1.9 million, or 27.0 percent, had been searching for 27 weeks or more. Ullrich’s September 4 commentary draws the line plainly: for people already employed the market feels stable, but for people looking, “the squeeze is real.”

CoBlack matches people against openings drawn from employer career pages and ATS feeds. The payroll count tripled its forecast. The hires rate sat at its lowest since February. Only one of those numbers answers the question a job seeker is asking.