Government shutdown means more delayed jobs data

After a week of corporate layoffs, there was a lot of job data expected to come out this week — from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for December on Tuesday to the big ones, like the jobs report and the unemployment rate for January, scheduled for this Friday.

But the partial government shutdown means that BLS will delay its data releases.

Whenever these data drops do occur, however, they’ll show what’s been going on in the job market recently and update the understanding of the past year through a process called “benchmark revisions,” said Daniel Zhao, chief economist at the job site Glassdoor.

“We might get a very different picture of 2025 in hindsight, where the job market was actually much slower than we originally thought, and thus much closer to stall speed,” he said.

Whenever these jobs numbers are released, he’ll be looking closely at health care.

“It's been the pillar of jobs growth over the last year or two years, and so any slowdown we see in the health care industry is concerning,” he said.

The latest reads showed a labor market that, overall, is stagnant.

Laura Ullrich, director of economic research in North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said she doesn’t see anything in its internal data that makes her think there’ll be big swings.

“I'm expecting to still see hires rates low, quits rates low. The layoff number, though, will be interesting because we have seen more, at least media reports of layoffs, but not an increase really in unemployment claims,” she said.

If the jobs report is delayed by a day or two, that wouldn’t be a big deal, per Jesse Rothstein, an economics professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

But if the shutdown drags on — again — and the data gets tangled up in it —again — “it means that we're flying blind that, we don't really have up-to-date information on how the labor market is doing at a time when we're already flying kind of half blind because of the effects of the October shutdown,” he said, “and at a time when the labor market seems to be teetering on an edge, and it's not clear if or when it's falling off that ledge.”

And if these data delays and disruptions become the new normal, Rothstein said that could make the picture of the labor market even fuzzier and harder to react to.