October Jobs Report: 165,000 New Jobs and a 339,000 Surge in Part-Time Work
Payrolls beat every forecast. The household survey tells a different story: hours cut, second jobs, and a broader underemployment rate that rose while the headline rate fell.
Employers added 165,000 jobs to nonfarm payrolls in October. That was more than double the 65,000 economists had forecast, and the unemployment rate slipped to 4.1 percent. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the October jobs report on Friday morning, the first major snapshot of the economy since the midterm elections, and the first readings called it a beat.
The household survey, the release’s other half, counted something else. The number of people working part time for economic reasons rose by 339,000 in October, to 4.8 million, and the bureau said the rise came almost entirely from slack work, employers cutting hours, which jumped by 356,000. Employers cut hours. The number of people who could only find part-time work barely moved, down 2,000 to 1,265,000.
On Threads, a commenter called mmccaystewart read the payroll number differently: “Bc people are getting second and third jobs to pay for higher cost of living.” The payroll count counts jobs rather than people, so a worker taking a second job shows up twice, and the household survey counts that same worker once. The release doesn’t say how many of the 165,000 were first jobs and how many were second ones.
Stephen Winkler, commenting on the Associated Press’s Facebook post, put the seasonal question: “Almost like they are hiring seasonal workers for the Holidays. Imagine that.” Temporary help did add 19,000 jobs after September’s decline, and couriers and messengers added 17,000. The bureau’s figures are seasonally adjusted, so the holiday calendar alone doesn’t explain them.
Employment in every other major industry “changed little,” the bureau said. Professional and business services added 70,000 jobs, health care 57,000, and transportation and warehousing 25,000, or 152,000 of the 165,000 between them. Leisure and hospitality lost 13,000 jobs. Construction lost 3,000. Wholesale trade lost 9,100. The diffusion index still read 57.6, above the 50 line that marks an even split between industries adding and shedding workers. The gains were spread widely but ran shallow outside the three sectors that did the hiring.
August was revised up by 53,000, to 186,000, and September by 31,000, to 60,000, a combined 84,000 jobs the first prints missed. Averaged over the three months, hiring ran at 137,000 a month. The September release had shown 51,000. Atilio Ciucci, on the same Facebook thread, caught the same point in plainer language: “And the last 2 months revised up almost 100k as well.”
Mohamed El-Erian called the report very strong in a post on Facebook. Average hourly earnings reached $38.00, up 14 cents on the month and 3.1 percent on the year. The last published inflation reading, September’s, was 3.7 percent. Production and nonsupervisory workers, about four in five private employees, earned $32.59 an hour, and their working week shortened by a tenth of an hour to 33.8. Diane Swonk, the chief economist at KPMG, read the same numbers as stagnation, saying the problem is the low rate of turnover, with fewer people entering the labor force.
Six million people outside the labor force said they wanted a job, and the bureau doesn’t count them as unemployed. The number marginally attached to the labor force rose by 171,000 to 1.6 million, and 448,000 of them were discouraged workers who believed no jobs were available. The long-term unemployed, out of work for 27 weeks or more, numbered just under two million, 27.6 percent of everyone unemployed.
On Reddit, a user asked whether the numbers were affected by “those layoffs of the people who calculate and keep track of these things.” The release gives no reason to think so. It arrived on schedule, and the hole in the bureau’s own record is a year old: the October 2025 survey was never collected during the government shutdown.
October’s consumer prices arrive on Tuesday without a 12-month comparison, because no prices were collected in October 2025, and the last official annual rate is September’s 3.7 percent. Most forecasters expect the Federal Reserve to raise its benchmark rate by a quarter point in December. The rate now stands at 3.75 to 4.00 percent.
The broad underemployment rate, U-6, rose to 7.9 percent from 7.6 percent in September. The official rate fell. Initial claims for unemployment benefits stood at 189,000, the lowest in two months.
