The old rule says you’re supposed to stop wearing white after Labor Day. For job seekers who spent the summer sending resumes into the void, there’s another piece of September lore worth paying attention to—the job market is supposed to pick back up.
The phenomenon has been dubbed the “September Surge,” a term Fortune was writing about as early as 2023, when it was gaining traction on TikTok.
Friday’s jobs report offered some encouraging signs heading into September. U.S. employers added 162,000 jobs in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while estimates for June and July were revised up by a combined 55,000 jobs. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%.
Kory Kantenga, LinkedIn’s head of economics for the Americas, told Fortune that economists typically adjust labor-market data to remove predictable seasonal swings. But those swings can matter to job seekers, and September is one of them.
“You see more job postings in September than you do any other time during the year, and that happens year after year,” Kantenga said.
