The world’s largest economy added exactly 36,517 jobs on net last month.
That’s according to an alternative report that aims to measure the overall hiring impulse in America by way of individual-level data from more than 100 million online professional profiles.
I never know whether to highlight the Revelio series. It’s an admirable effort to conjure a nonfarm payrolls estimate not produced by an agency subject to the vagaries of Beltway melodrama, but no one trades it. And with apologies to Revelio, no one ever will. Thursday’s print could’ve been negative 36,517 or negative 365,170 and exactly nobody sitting in front of a Bloomie would’ve cared.
But, the series is at least directionally consistent with the BLS establishment survey headline, and market participants anyway harbor a lot of doubts about government data these days. So, I lean towards mentioning the release, which is always scheduled for the Thursday before the BLS jobs report.
There’s the chart, updated with today’s print and historical revisions. For reference, Revelio tallied gains exceeding 50,000 jobs for both June and July. 36,517 for August thus counts as a deceleration.
The biggest gains were in public administration, health care, social assistance and professional and business services. That latter category showed a meaningful loss in Wednesday’s ADP release, which people do trade.
Despite that discrepancy, the Revelio and ADP headlines for August were almost identical.
The figure above shows you the average of Revelio, ADP and NFP headline monthly hiring, and the three-month average of that average. The August placeholder excludes NFP.
If you’re inclined to suggest this is all noise and no signal, I’ll be the very last person to argue. Frankly, I don’t think anyone knows what’s going on with the US labor market anymore. It seems like we might’ve reached the point of negative marginal returns in our belabored (no pun intended) attempts to discern something meaningful through statistics.
Earlier Thursday, Challenger said job cuts were relatively subdued last month, when AI replacement took a backseat to more mundane explanations for what layoffs there were.
Meanwhile, jobless claims rose but remained very low in Thursday’s update from the Labor Department. At 206,000, the headline initial filers print was basically in line.
The four-week average moved up again, to 207,250. If you born after July 2026, you’ve never seen that metric so high.
