The US economy added more than twice as many jobs as expected in September after shedding a few thousand positions during the prior month, hopelessly stale figures released on Thursday showed.

Economists expected 50,000 from the NFP readout. Instead, the BLS offered up 119,000, the best read on headline hiring since April. The response rate for the establishment survey was 80%, higher than usual due to the availability of electronically self-reported data by businesses during the shutdown in October.

The apparent re-acceleration came not a moment too soon. August’s hiring impulse was revised away entirely on Thursday. That month’s headline now reflects a 4,000 net job loss, the second negative print in three months.

With the robust figure for September, the three-month average is 62,000. It had slipped below 20,000 the month prior.

A quick look at the breakdown shows hiring was concentrated in health care, social assistance, transportation, restaurants and bars. That’s par for the course and at least suggests if you drink yourself half to death at dinner, there’ll be someone to drive you to the hospital and also someone to take care of you when you get there, assuming you’re not in a rural area.

Average hourly earnings rose a tame 0.2% MoM and a likewise benign 2.8% YoY.

On the household survey side, the unemployment rate moved up to 4.4%. That’s the highest since October of 2021. The participation rate also edged up, though, which takes some sting out of the uptick in the jobless rate.

It’s tempting to suggest the surprisingly robust NFP headline for September rules out a rate cut at next month’s Fed meeting. Note that the odds of a third straight cut had already receded below 30% prior to Thursday’s hiring update.

Between the October FOMC minutes — which suggested even last month’s cut was a close call — and the BLS’s announcement that the November jobs report and establishment survey data covering October won’t be released until a week after the December policy meeting, traders put the chances of a move at next month’s gathering at just 25%.

Of course, most alternative measures of hiring — e.g., ADP, Challenger, Revelio — strongly suggest downside risks to the labor market have grown over the past month. Toss in a UNR that very nearly rounded up to 4.5% (4.44%) and the downward revision to August headline hiring, and you could make the case that hope floats for the third cut tipped by the September dot plot.

The Committee’s hawks are staging a last stand of sorts ahead of 2026, when Donald Trump will move to tighten his grip on US monetary policy. On Wednesday, at an event with Mohamed bin Salman, Trump said of Jerome Powell, “I’d love to fire his ass. The guy’s grossly incompetent.”