You’re not imagining it, the job market is weakening

The September job numbers "beat expectations." To ordinary people, that means nothing.

The delayed jobs report for September came in better than economists expected. Employers created 119,000 jobs during the month, more than twice the average forecast by economists.

Don’t be impressed. Breathless headlines about job growth “blowing past expectations” make this sound like good news. But economist expectations aren’t relevant to the real economy ordinary people experience every day. Zoom out a little, and the September employment report actually validates the slowdown in the job market that’s been underway since 2023 and is worsening this year.

In 2024, employers added 168,000 new jobs per month, on average. That was a solid pace and more normal than the insane hiring in 2021 and 2022, when trillions of dollars in post-Covid stimulus money was sloshing through the economy.

Employment in 2025 has averaged just 76,000 new jobs per month. Since May, the average is just 39,000 new jobs per month. In June and August, job growth was negative for the first time since the Covid shutdowns in 2020.

This chart shows the trend. Monthly numbers jump around, but the trend is clearly downward. The black dotted line is the moving 3-month average, which was a paltry 18,000 new jobs per month in August and is now a slightly better 62,000 new jobs.

Those weakening numbers suggest the “vibecession” is more than a national case of the jitters. Consumer confidence is near record lows because Americans see their prospects worsening. A job market less robust than it was one year ago is a basic benchmark of gloom.

It could obviously be worse. The economy is still growing and big layoff announcements appear to be more episodic than universal. A stock market rally is still on and there’s no reason to think a recession is imminent.

But President Trump faces the same vexing problem President Biden did when inflation soared in 2022 and 2023: Convincing Americans they’re better off than they think they are. It didn’t work for Biden. Trump can say, well, inflation isn’t nearly as bad as it was then, and we’ve still got some job growth. It won’t be convincing.