Today is Thursday, Oct. 30, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ weekly report on jobless claims nationwide usually comes out. But with the government shutdown, it remains absent.

It’s been about a month without most government labor market data. We’re already missing the September Jobs report, and chances are there won’t be October’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey or jobs report next week as originally scheduled.

And at the same time, as learned yesterday from the Federal Reserve Chair’s presser, the Central Bank is highly focused on the job market as it tries to cut interest rates enough to maximize employment but not so much that it unleashes more inflation. And that’s a hard balancing act when there’s limited government data on what either is doing.

Fed Chair Powell did talk yesterday about a labor market that’s ‘gradually cooling,’ with demand for workers softening and risks to employment to the ‘downside.’

The last thing known about the job market comes from the August jobs report, which said job creation had already slowed down heading into the government shutdown in early October:

“Obviously everything’s not looking great,” said Lisa Simon at Revelio Labs, which is crunching job numbers of its own — based on 105 million employment profiles on sites like LinkedIn. 

Revelio used its own jobs data, combined with published employment data from payroll processor ADP, to come up with an estimate of job creation for September, if the jobs report had been released: around 30,000. 

For October, “I sort of expect a number that is essentially around zero,” Simon said.

So, no job growth this month. Another useful private-sector data source: employment sites, which track online job-postings.

“ZipRecruiter’s marketplace data shows job postings started to fall towards the end of September, into October,” said Nicole Bachaud, a ZipRecruiter economist.

There isn’t an official update on unemployment, which was still pretty low, at 4.3%, in August. But there is sentiment data on how American workers are doing.

“It’s just really difficult to find a job if you don’t have a job. And that’s been characteristic of the economy over the past year,” said Sofia Baig at polling firm Morning Consult.  

Consumer sentiment has been in the dumps. And major companies announcing thousands of layoffs recently surely won’t help. They include UPS, GM, and Amazon, which is a Marketplace underwriter. 

“Big mega-cuts, you only see in conditions where the economy is beginning, from a labor standpoint, to take a turn for the worse,” said John Challenger at outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Like in the Great Recession and early in the pandemic. And at least then, there was up-to-date government data to help understand what was going on. 

Correction (Nov. 6, 2025): An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the way in which Revelio Labs estimated job creation for September. To create its estimate, Revelio used its own proprietary data, along with published employment data from payroll processor ADP.