The September jobs report is out, six weeks after it was originally supposed to be released. The headline figures aren’t too shabby: Employers added 119,000 jobs in September, which is more than economists expected. On the other hand, the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%.

That first number, the total number of jobs added in September, comes from what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the establishment survey. It’s a survey that asks businesses how many jobs they added in any given month.

The BLS included a special note in Thursday’s report explaining that the survey’s response rates were unusually high, thanks to the government shutdown.

There isn’t any law or incentive pushing businesses to respond quickly to a BLS survey.

Preston Mui, senior economist at Employ American, said not all firms fill out the report in time. Response rates for the initial jobs reports after any given month are sometimes as low as 50%, he added.

But remember: the September report came out nearly seven weeks late.

“So that gave firms more time to fill out the forms, and so the first release of the data saw a higher collection rate than usual,” Mui said.

The BLS said the response rate for the September report was more than 80%. That’s the highest since late 2019.

“This is kind of a shift because we’ve seen that response rates have really suffered since the pandemic. That’s not just for the BLS, but across other government surveys, and private surveys, too,” said Courtney Shupert, an economist at Macropolicy Perspectives.

She said it could be that trust in government and private sector surveys is eroding. It could also be that many businesses are having a tough year dealing with economic uncertainty.

“When firms are struggling, they’re not going to be focusing on turning in a survey response. They’re probably focusing on whether they can make payroll or not,” Shupert said.

While it is welcome news that response rates were higher for the September report, Kate Bahn, chief economist at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said we already have a process meant to incorporate late responses from businesses: revisions.

So the report that came out Thursday, for instance, also contained revised numbers for July and August.

“Revisions are an important and normal part of improving accuracy of data. This is just how data collection works. And it does not mean there’s something wrong with that data collection,” Bahn said.

Even though extending data collection periods can increase response rates, Bahn said it’s also important that the BLS keeps releasing jobs data in a timely fashion.

“We have a need for really quick-response data in our economy. And you know, the Fed is looking at these monthly reports because they need something on a regular basis,” she said.

Bahn said timely jobs data is more effective for policymaking — even if it means bigger revisions later on.