The jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for November 2025 was finally released this morning, after a delay induced by the federal government shutdown. The report offers some anxiously awaited information on the job market - but probably not as much clarity as the Federal Reserve hoped it would get.

The BLS did not field a household survey in October, so the November results must be compared with those of September, making the numbers a bit less comparable to the usual monthly changes. The payroll survey for November can be compared with October, since employers kept and reported numbers for each month.

What do the numbers show? On the household side, the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.6 percent (from 4.4 in September). The number of people employed actually bumped up by about 96,000, but this was not enough to absorb a labor force that grew by over 300,000. While most of the underlying categories of unemployment changed little, the number of workers........

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