August’s Jobs Report Beat the Average & Tech Kept Cutting Anyway
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Employers added 162,000 jobs in August, more than five times the 31,000 monthly average of the past year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the number this morning, and on its face, it’s the best single month this labor market has produced in a long stretch. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%.
Food service accounted for a big share of that growth, adding 59,000 jobs against a normal pace of about 12,000. Local government education added 42,000, likely a seasonal hiring pattern tied to the new school year more than a sign of broader strength. Manufacturing added 16,000, its fourth straight month of gains and now up 58,000 since bottoming out in December 2025. Construction added 22,000.
Healthcare, usually one of the most dependable job-growth categories in any monthly report, added only 13,000 against a 32,000 average. It’s a real slowdown in a sector that rarely slows down, and it’s worth watching over the next couple of reports before calling it a trend.
Information lost 23,000 jobs, and the breakdown matters more than the total. Computing infrastructure and data processing lost 8,000, publishing lost 7,000, and broadcasting and content lost 5,000. Professional and business services, retail, financial activities, and transportation and warehousing all came in flat, which lines up with the same white-collar hesitation I flagged after July’s JOLTS report showed hires falling 188,000 in that same professional and business services category.
The revisions are the other half of this story, and they move in the opposite direction from what this labor market has trained us to expect. June was revised up 11,000, and July was revised up 44,000, moving July from a reported loss of 23,000 jobs to a gain of 21,000. Together, that’s 55,000 more jobs than we thought existed a month ago. After a stretch where downward revisions became the default and even prompted BLS to double-check its own credibility on the annual benchmark, an upward swing this size is the kind of detail that deserves attention alongside the headline number.
Wages moved too. Average hourly earnings hit $37.75, up 10 cents for the month and 3.1% over the year, comfortably ahead of inflation. Labor force participation slipped to 61.6%, down half a point since January, and involuntary part-time work fell by 414,000 to 4.4 million. Fewer people are stuck in part-time roles who want full-time work, which is a genuine improvement, even as fewer people overall are participating in the labor force at all.
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Tech Employment Kept Shrinking Even With AI Hiring on the Rise
CompTIA’s newest Tech Jobs Report lines up with what BLS said this morning, and it explains where some of that information-sector loss is coming from. The report’s own overview puts tech industry employment down about 14,700 in August, though it’s worth flagging that the five sub-sectors listed in CompTIA’s own table only add up to a 9,800 decline, a gap that exists in the report itself, not in how it’s being summarized here.
The sub-sector detail still tells a consistent story regardless of which total you use. IT services and custom software firms, along with tech manufacturing, accounted for most of the losses CompTIA tracked, continuing a pattern that has held through most of 2026. The report puts the tech unemployment rate at roughly 3%, a rough read off the report’s chart, not a number stated directly in the text, but one that’s meaningfully below the overall 4.1% rate BLS reported today.
The part that cuts against the layoff headlines is the AI hiring line sitting underneath them: tech job postings tied to AI skills have climbed to roughly 320,000, up from around 100,000 two years ago, based on the same kind of chart-level estimate. Tech employment is shrinking in aggregate while a specific slice of it, AI-related roles, keeps expanding. This matches the pattern I wrote about after Challenger’s August job cuts report, where AI showed up as both a cause of layoffs and a source of new hiring inside the same monthly count.
For employers building out any kind of technical team, the read here comes down to one split. Broad tech hiring is still soft, so the market for general IT and software talent gives you more room to be selective than it has in years. AI-specific roles are a different market entirely, one where demand has more than tripled in two years and the competition for the right candidate looks nothing like the rest of tech. Treat those as two separate hiring plans, not one.
