When the U.S. government shut down on Wednesday, 1 October 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also shut down. Because the BLS shut down, the September 2025 jobs report was put on hold until such a time the Congress passes a bill to fund its operations.

For us, that's a minor inconvenience because we use the BLS' jobs data paired with age demographic data to track the employment situation for U.S. teens. While we'd like to have the latest data, we really don't expect it to show any major changes from when we last covered the teen jobs scene.

For others, the absence of the BLS' jobs data could be a bigger inconvenience. Especially analysts who use the data to divine how institutions like the Federal Reserve might adapt monetary policy because of how the jobs data is changing.

That's why it is a huge mistake to only rely on the BLS for jobs data. Fortunately, the BLS doesn't have a monopoly on what many analysts consider to be the most useful portion of its jobs report: its seasonally adjusted estimates of the total number of jobs being done in the U.S. by the nonfarm workforce.

Private sector firms like Revelio Labs have developed independent estimates of total nonfarm employment in the U.S. economy that doesn't rely on whether the BLS' data jocks have approved funding to do their jobs. Or even if they do it as well as needed, as has come into question in recent years.

Either way, the current shut down makes independently developed estimates especially useful. We tapped Revelio Labs' data for seasonally adjusted total nonfarm employment in the U.S. to compare their estimates with those of the BLS in the period from January 2022 through September 2025. Or really, from January 2022 through August 2022 because there is no BLS estimate for September 2025 at this writing. The following pair of charts shows this data and also how it changed from the preceding month:

Revelio Labs' describes what makes their total nonfarm employment estimates different from the BLS' estimates in the press release reporting their initial September 2025 estimate:

RPLS is a freely available macroeconomic labor market set of statistics built from 100+ million U.S. profiles to provide a clear view of workforce dynamics. It follows a format similar to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), tracking employment levels, wages, and job transitions at a scale that traditional surveys cannot, offering a continuous picture of the labor market. RPLS intends to close the growing information gap and deliver unbiased data on the U.S. workforce for policymakers, businesses, and the public....

Powered by a dataset representing close to the whole population of employed people in the United States, Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) draws from 100+ million U.S. profiles that mirror the national workforce and cover two-thirds of all employed individuals, compared to an estimated 27% from the BLS establishment survey and 0.03% from the BLS household survey.

The quality of the BLS' employment estimates have deteriorated because the size of its sampling of U.S. employers plunged during the 2020's coronavirus pandemic and has not recovered, which gives the BLS a much less complete picture of the nation's employment situation than it had before. Meanwhile, the BLS has used statistical models to try to compensate for that core problem, which have proven to fall wide of the mark in recent years. These problems have led the BLS to miscount total nonfarm employment, which has resulted in the BLS having to issue two major revisions to its estimates in the last 14 months.

All of which has made the BLS' employment situation data less than optimal for policy makers who use it to set their policies. Fortunately, there are alternatives to the BLS' data that can complement it by helping provide a more complete picture of the employment situation in the U.S. Or that can provide a reasonable overall picture when the BLS' jobs numbers aren't available.

Do check out Revelio Labs' total nonfarm employment data and its other data products. They provide a lot more detail than we've covered in this article.

References

Revelio Labs. Total Nonfarm Employment National. [CSV Data]. 2 October 2025.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total Nonfarm Employment. Current Employment Statistics - CES. [Online database]. Last Updated 5 September 2025.

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