With all the uncertainty swirling around the economy — over tariffs and inflation, the cost of doing business and the cost of living — it was a relief to see the recent solid, strong jobs report for June from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It showed 147,000 nonfarm payroll jobs added and the unemployment rate falling to 4.1%.
But almost immediately, there were questions. Skeptics said that what looked like a surge in state and local government jobs (+80,000, mostly in education) might be the result of faulty seasonal adjustment. And the fall in unemployment may not paint such a favorable picture, if it’s driven by people dropping out of the workforce (the civilian labor force has fallen by 755,000 since April).
So, we went looking for other labor market data, beyond the monthly jobs report, to suss out how healthy the job market really is right now.
BLS jobs data is still the primary go-to source for economists, business planners and Federal Reserve policymakers, said Daniel Zhao, lead economist at job site Glassdoor. “Ultimately, we do still regard data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics as the gold standard of what’s going on in the job market, and that’s why policymakers hang their hat on it,” he said. “The benefit of working with data from the government is that they’re also very transparent about changes and challenges that they might be facing.”
But, BLS reports like the monthly jobs report (officially known as the Employment Situation Summary) and JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary) have drawbacks as well. “Economic data is lagging,” said Zhao. “Certainly, the best economic data that comes from the government takes longer to collect and compile.”
Economist Sean Snaith at the University of Central Florida agreed, pointing out that the survey data for the monthly jobs report is collected and analyzed several weeks before it’s released, while the JOLTS report lags by more than a month. “You’re looking backwards,” said Snaith, “and you’re sort of looking through a glass darkly. This is preliminary data, it’s going to be revised, it’s going to change.”
Plus, the monthly jobs report is survey-based, using a statistical sample of 121,000 employers and 60,000 households — that’s extrapolated to the whole economy. By contrast, payroll-processing platforms can crunch data on millions of workers in near-real-time.
The company Homebase manages schedules, time tracking, pay and hiring for more than 2 million small business employees, said CEO John Waldmann. And they can sometimes anticipate big pivots in the economy. “Small businesses provide a really early signal, well before larger businesses, frankly well before the BLS,” said Waldmann. “In times of economic volatility, small businesses operate cautiously. And we have seen that throughout 2025 — slowing their pace of hiring, reducing their team sizes, had their teams working fewer hours.”
Payroll processor UKG similarly handles pay and HR for more than 6 million hourly shift-workers nationwide. Lead labor economist Edward Hearn said it provides “just about as close to real-time information on workforce movements and sign-in/sign-outs and what the workforce is doing than other more traditional survey-based methods. We are able to see very quickly, day-over-day, week-over-week; we saw that in the pandemic, shift work declined about 75% over the course of a few weeks.”
And here’s what Hearn has been seeing in the timecards and employee counts he tracks: “Shift-work growth has been up in the 1.0% to 1.5% range in the last three months; employers are being cautious in hiring; employees are hesitant to look for work or quit or separate from work at all.”
Contrary to the June jobs report, which found strong growth in health care employment, UKG sees a slowdown in that sector: “Health care — which has driven a lot of employment growth — is starting to kind of cool a bit in terms of hires and separations, and it’s also cooled a bit in terms of shift work.”
Online job sites such as Glassdoor have a lot of real-time data about job openings, pay and hiring trends. Glassdoor economist Daniel Zhao said that in terms of government data, he closely tracks the Labor Department’s weekly jobless claims report. It’s based on administrative data from all 50 states, rather than a survey, and counts all workers who file a new claim, or continue on unemployment week-after-week without finding a job.
“Unemployment insurance claims on an initial basis are pretty similar to what we’ve seen in the last few years, and so there isn’t necessarily a sign that layoffs are rising above normal levels,” said Zhao. “But continuing claims are starting to rise. That’s signaling hiring is slowing down. It’s getting harder for people on unemployment insurance to come of it, because they’re finding it harder to get a new job.”
At Glassdoor, Zhao also has access to anecdotal evidence — opinions shared by employees and jobseekers. “One thing that we hear from many employees is that they feel burned out, they feel overworked,” Zhao said. “A very common story: a worker has survived a few rounds of layoffs, but they have to do the job of multiple people. In an environment where employers have more power they might not necessarily lay off a burned-out worker, but they can squeeze a little bit more efficiency out of the workers that they do have.”
Predicting where the economy and the job market are going is hard. At any given time, different data sets can be a key to anticipating the future, or a misleading distraction.
Sean Snaith directs the Institute for Economic Forecasting at the University of Central Florida, but he’s humble about what he can accomplish: “You use models,” he said, “you use math and statistics, but those are imperfect. It’s science but it’s also art.”
One of Snaith’s go-to data sets is the BLS’s JOLTS report, and in particular: “I look at the quits rate, refer to it myself as the ‘Johnny Paycheck Index’ — who famously sang the country song ‘Take this job and shove it.’ It shows the willingness of people to voluntarily leave a job.”
Right now, quits are low (2.1% in May, compared to historic peaks of 3.0% in 2021 and 2022), indicating people don’t feel confident about finding a new job if they leave their current one.
Layoffs are also low, though Snaith points out — that tends to be a lagging economic indicator. “In a normal cycle, you have a slow month, a slow quarter, businesses don’t immediately respond to that by laying people off,” Snaith said. “It’s not good for morale, there are costs associated with hiring and firing employees.”
But Snaith does anticipate that a moderate uptick in joblessness is coming. “We’re currently forecasting for the unemployment rate to drift higher in the year ahead, payroll employment growth to continue to slow.”
Still, he said: “By historical standards this labor market is in very good shape. People are working, they have paychecks, they’re continuing to spend.”