US Jobs - 2025-12-15

What a mess. October and November payrolls all at once. No household survey data for October. We apologize it took so much longer than usual to issue this report, and we hope it doesn't have any errors!

November's payrolls were right at expectations with the kind of low number we have to expect given the hard-stop in immigration. But October's payrolls were sharply lower, making the third negative payroll print this year. We still aren't treating it as a recession signal, but rather the result of the scaling effect of large-scale self-deportation of recent immigrants. Thankfully we seem to be in a sufficiently robust post-pandemic productivity-led boom that this shrinkage of workers isn't showing up as a recession.