US jobs report: Why economists can’t seem to predict it correctly
Let’s start with the recent misses. The 95,000 gap between what economists were expecting for October and the actual numbers wasn’t even the biggest of the year. Estimates for February, March, July and August were off by more than 100,000 each of those months. The average size of the miss, ignoring whether it missed low or high, has been around 88,000 in 2026, up from about 50,000 in 2010-2019, the period that I’m using as a proxy for ‘normal.’
