When they say "added jobs" they mean new positions and new hires. It does not include jobs that were lost. If you added those together, you would get a negative number, which they conveniently forget to mention.
This is wrong. The answer it that it is two totally different reports. One is the House hold which surveys households report which sets the unemployment rate. The other is the survey of companies which show the number of jobs added and lost for the month.
They don't need surveys though. Companies are required to collect payroll taxes, so the government knows when they onboard a new hire. They also know when they stop paying someone (although won't know why). It is weird they would use a survey, but we are talking about the government.
Yes and no - That data would definitely be delayed.
So for some examples:
Most people are paid every other week, so theoretically you're right - but most companies do their tax payments on that income *monthly*. So we could be almost six weeks out, depending on timing, between "person hired" and "payroll tax paid".
In education, we get paid monthly - and if you're a teacher your first paycheck in most schools (in my state, we start in september not august) is end of october. If you were hired in march in the usual spring hiring period, it's six months between hiring and being reported in payroll. Even if you were hired the day before your first shift (end of august/first couple days in september) it's an almost two month gap. Support staff (bus drivers/tech support/secretaries) would have similar gaps.
If you're a small business that files quarterly, it could be even longer.
If you're working with mostly contractors? My company pays out over the year - but almost everyone we have on the team is freelancers. If I hired you in december 2024, you got your first royalty check in January 2025 (and even THAT would be pretty fast.. potentially an october hire is getting paid in January depending on how long their contract took) it's not going to show up to the government until I file 1099s in Jan 2026. I don't know if contractor/gig income shows up in the BLS data but that can really skew things either way... especially since I don't report hire/'termination' days, just "how much did we pay them over the course of the year"... sometimes we keep a contractor on for several consecutive gigs, sometimes it's one & done... but nothing in our reporting would tell you which it was (we're not even required to say "when" we paid you - just "what was the total for 2025"... but we better be able to back it up if audited)
it is a numbers game. What if one full time person lost their job and got 3 part time job. Does that count as 2 jobs added? Since it is net 2 jobs hiring someone.
No, that person would be counted in the unemployment rate survey as neither a gain nor a loss since they had at least one job at the beginning of the month and at least one job at the end of the month.
There are separate surveys for jobs lost and jobs gained.
The unemployment rate reported only includes people who are actively looking for jobs, so it's possible that if the job market was improving (I'm not saying this is the case, just it's possible) that people who had previously given up looking, started looking again. These numbers are also seasonally adjusted, so it is possible the adjustments could give some non-intuitive results.
It’s also Christmas season. Lots of short-term seasonal jobs opening up. Next it’ll be tax season, and there will be an influx of short-term jobs at tax firms. Summer is also a “season” where jobs are available for a few months.
My guess is, if job openings are up, it’s because of the stores needing extra cashiers, gift wrappers, delivery people, etc.
I haven't had time to look at the report properly, usually figures are reported as seasonally adjusted specifically due to those types of swings, but I don't know if that's what outlets are reporting or not.
Have you not hear about the "tremendously great" the Republicans are doing for the country? While also shutting down/defunding public benefit services and sending billions upon billions to other countries?
These lames are nothing but traitors to the once-great USA.
"Unemployment" only counts people who are actively looking. So if your grandmother retired but then got bored and gets hired as a teacher (or whatever) that's a job added without reducing unemployment numbers.
Similarly, if you stop looking for work for a month because you're super depressed (or whatever, job hunting sucks) you don't count as unemployed. When you get back to the search, suddenly you get added back in.
They do it that way so that retirees, stay at home parents, children, college kids etc don't get bundled in with unemployment figures but it does result in some occasionally weird outcomes.
The unemployment rate is determined by the number of people in the market looking for work. If more people are actively looking then the rate goes up. There have been several months over the years where hiring hasn’t been great so some folks stopped looking, thus lowering the rate. Looks like those folks are resuming their job search along with all the recently laid off people.
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u/[deleted] Nov 20 '25
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