This week brought a vanishingly rare jobs report on Tuesday after the longest government shutdown in history threw a wrench in federal data collection, and it was a mixed bag.
The new data emphasized trends we’ve been seeing this year, including unemployment inching up and a tougher market for many job seekers.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics delayed the report from December 5 to extend data collection and processing after its activities were affected by the government shutdown that lasted from October to about mid-November.
The new data allowed economists, job seekers, reporters, and more to understand how job growth looked in both October and November; the BLS didn’t produce an October jobs report last month. While the report was missing items like the October unemployment rate, it gives us a fresh look at the labor market.
Here are four takeaways from the latest jobs report.
The job market is still frozen
Both Nicole Bachaud, a labor Economist at ZipRecruiter, and Laura Ullrich, the director of economic research in North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, described the job market as still stagnant.
The US economy added 64,000 jobs in November, surpassing the 50,000 expected. That comes after a big net loss in October, largely because federal workers who took the deferred resignation offered as part of the DOGE job cuts earlier this year finally appeared in the data after the deferment ended.
Data published by the BLS last week showed job openings have been trending upward as of October, although they’re still far below what job seekers were accustomed to a few years ago. Workers’ confidence has also been low, as October’s quit rate was the lowest since 2020.
“Job growth has been very slow over the course of 2025, and it doesn’t seem like we’ve turned around quite yet to translate the pent-up demand for hiring and the recent increase in job openings into actual hires,” Bachaud said, adding that uncertainty over tariffs, inflation, and geopolitical issues has added to companies holding back on hiring plans.
“That’s the big question mark — when is that uncertainty going to finally ease up?” she said.
Healthcare’s job growth masks weakness in many other sectors
The better-than-expected growth in November was largely helped by job growth in healthcare, so Ullrich said this “doesn’t show a whole lot of strength in the macro labor market.”
Healthcare and social assistance sectors together had a net gain of 64,000 over the month. Most industries had a decline or a small rise in employment. Manufacturing, for instance, has continued its ongoing net loss.
Healthcare has been a bright spot throughout the year, and Bachaud said there will still be demand for workers as the population ages. However, it could be challenging for job seekers to pivot into these positions. Ullrich said many jobs in the sector typically require certain training and education.
“Construction is the other industry that we saw really strong growth in, as there is demand for continued skilled trades,” Bachaud said. Construction added 28,000 jobs, with the largest growth from specialty trade contractors.
Employers still have the upper hand
Wage growth has gradually cooled and reached the lowest point so far this year in November. Average hourly earnings rose 3.5% from a year ago.
The generally softer job market has made it harder for workers to negotiate higher wages. Ullrich said physicians have better wage-setting power than roles that aren’t seeing a lot of openings and where talent is waiting on the sidelines for a role.
She said employers can probably offer lower raises to current talent, too, since more people are staying put.
“If you know people aren’t quitting, you might not have to offer them the same bump in pay that you would if the quits rate was higher,” she said. “That being said, there’s still very tight competition for certain roles.”
Unemployment is the highest since 2021
The October 2025 unemployment rate won’t ever be released because that data, typically gathered from a survey of around 60,000 households a month, couldn’t be collected during or after the government shutdown. However, unemployment had been trending upward before that, and November was the same story.
November’s unemployment rate was the highest since September 2021 and slightly higher than expected. Still, the Bureau of Labor Statistics warned of data issues with unemployment and related figures over the next few months due to the missing October household survey, so economists and others will have to see how the rate continues to pan out.
Despite the data challenges, Bachaud said the higher unemployment rate and stickier long-term unemployment, where people have been out of a job for at least 27 weeks and actively searching, indicate that it has become harder to land a job.
