Job Market
The number of Americans who were marginally attached to the labor force fell sharply in September, even as the broader pool of people outside the labor force who wanted a job changed little.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 1.468 million people were marginally attached to the labor force in September, down 236,000 from August. These are people who wanted a job, were available for work, and had looked for work sometime during the prior 12 months, but had not searched during the four weeks before the survey.
That distinction matters because marginally attached workers are not counted as unemployed under the official unemployment-rate definition.
A narrower measure of labor-market attachment
BLS said 5.8 million people outside the labor force wanted a job in September, a figure that changed little over the month. Within that group, marginally attached workers declined from 1.704 million in August to 1.468 million in September.
Discouraged workers, a subset who were not actively searching because they believed no jobs were available for them or cited another job-market reason, were little changed at 414,000.
The one-month decline should not be interpreted as 236,000 people necessarily finding jobs. People can leave the marginally attached category for several reasons, including resuming an active job search, finding work, becoming unavailable for work, or no longer saying they want a job. The monthly survey does not assign the entire change to one destination.
Why this matters for reading the job market
The official unemployment rate was 4.2% in September, but the unemployment rate counts only people without jobs who were actively looking for work. Marginal attachment captures a different layer of labor-market slack.
BLS’s broader U-5 measure—which adds discouraged workers and other marginally attached people to the unemployed—was 5.0% in September. The U-6 measure, which also includes people working part time for economic reasons, was 7.6%.
Those measures do not replace the headline unemployment rate. They answer different questions about how many people are on the edges of the labor force and how much unused labor capacity remains.
For employers, a smaller marginally attached pool can mean fewer people immediately available to re-enter active job search, although one month is not enough to establish a sustained tightening trend. For job seekers, it is another reminder that labor-market conditions cannot be summarized by one unemployment figure.
What to watch
The next check is whether marginal attachment remains near September’s level or rebounds in October, and whether the decline is accompanied by changes in labor-force participation, active unemployment and part-time-for-economic-reasons employment.
Sources
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The Employment Situation — September 2026,” October 2, 2026. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_10022026.htm
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation Summary Table A, September 2026. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm
Featured photo: Job applicants wait in an office before interviews. Representative image only; the people pictured are not connected to the BLS survey and do not necessarily represent the marginally attached population. Photo: Vitaly Gariev via Unsplash (Unsplash License).
