Research & Data
Atlanta’s next official labor-market update arrives Wednesday, September 30, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases August employment and unemployment estimates for metropolitan areas at 10 a.m. Eastern. Until then, July remains the latest comparable BLS benchmark for the Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell metro area.
Two versions of July
One of those July benchmarks is the size of the metro labor force. The smoothed, seasonally adjusted BLS series distributed through the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows a July labor force of 3,345,398. The not-seasonally-adjusted BLS estimate for the same month is 3,351,591. Both figures are preliminary and will be revised in Wednesday’s release.
Which version is quoted matters. Seasonal adjustment removes predictable swings such as summer hiring, so the two numbers answer slightly different questions and should not be mixed in the same comparison. The labor force also counts people who live in the metro area and are working or actively looking for work. It is not a count of payroll jobs located in the region.
Don’t borrow the state number
Georgia’s statewide August figures were released September 18 and showed an unemployment rate of 3.2%, also preliminary. State and metro estimates cover different geographies and can move differently. Labeling Georgia’s August rate as Atlanta’s would create false precision and hide the lag in the local series. jobgetr.ai does not substitute state or national values for Atlanta measures that have not yet been published.
What Wednesday will and will not show
Wednesday’s release will update the metro area’s labor force, employment and unemployment for August. Payroll employment by industry for metro areas comes from a separate survey and should be read alongside the household-based measures, not blended with them.
The data will still be backward-looking. Employers and job seekers making decisions at the end of September are working several weeks past the reference month. Hiring events, job-posting measures and employer announcements can add more current context, but they do not replace the official estimates. September figures for states are scheduled for October 20 and for metro areas, including Atlanta, on October 28.
Sources
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Metropolitan Area Employment and Unemployment” release schedule, checked September 28, 2026. https://www.bls.gov/schedule/news_release/metro.htm
- Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), “Civilian Labor Force in Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA (MSA),” series ATLA013LF, smoothed seasonally adjusted, last updated September 2, 2026. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATLA013LF
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Local Area Unemployment Statistics, series LAUMT131206000000006 (Atlanta metro labor force, not seasonally adjusted), accessed via the BLS Public Data API September 28, 2026. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LAUMT131206000000006
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “State Employment and Unemployment” release schedule, checked September 28, 2026. https://www.bls.gov/schedule/news_release/laus.htm
Featured photo: An aerial view of metro Atlanta in February 2026, with the downtown and Midtown skylines at center. Photo: WMrapids, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0). Cropped from the original.
