When is the next jobs report?
The jobs report is published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at 8:30am Eastern. Here is the next date and the schedule behind it, with what the number measures and what it does not.
The schedule
| Day | Date | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Friday | Nov 6, 2026 | 8:30am Eastern |
What it measures
The Employment Situation is two surveys published together. The establishment survey asks businesses how many people were on their payrolls and produces the headline payrolls number. The household survey asks people whether they have work and produces the unemployment rate. They are different samples asking different questions, which is why they sometimes disagree in the same month.
What it does not say
The payrolls figure is not a count of jobs created. It is a net change — hires minus separations — estimated from a sample and then revised twice as more responses arrive. The unemployment rate is not the share of adults without work either: it counts only people who looked for a job recently, so a rate can fall because people found work or because people stopped looking, and the headline reads identically in both cases.
Commonly confused: payrolls and job openings
The jobs report counts people on payrolls last month. JOLTS, published separately and a month further behind, counts advertised vacancies, hires, quits and layoffs. Commentary routinely mixes them into a single claim about the labour market, which is how a strong payrolls number and a weakening jobs market end up described in the same sentence without anyone noticing the two figures are months apart.
Where to look first when it lands
- The two prior months' revisions, printed in the same release and often larger than the surprise everyone is reacting to.
- The participation rate, which says whether a falling unemployment rate is good news.
- Average hourly earnings against the latest CPI — pay only rises in real terms if it outruns prices.
No forecast, on purpose
There is no consensus figure on this page. Consensus is a licensed product — a survey of economists, compiled and sold by a data vendor — and we do not license it. A date with no forecast beside it is a fact. A date with an invented forecast beside it is a fabrication with a decimal point on it.