Dive Brief:

• U.S. employers increased available jobs in October to the highest level in five months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday, as the labor market showed signs of cooling, including a decline in hiring.
• The health care, retail and wholesale trade sectors pushed up available positions across the job market to 7.67 million in October from 7.66 million in September, the BLS said. The quits rate — or the percentage of workers who voluntarily leave their employer — declined to 1.8% the lowest level in nearly three years and a sign of low-confidence in the outlook for hiring.
• “There’s no holiday cheer for job seekers,” Navy Federal Credit Union Chief Economist Heather Long said. “Almost no one is getting hired right now,” she said in an email, adding “the October hiring rate fell back to 3.2%, which is one of the lowest rates since the Great Recession.”

Dive Insight:

Futures traders expect that a divided Federal Reserve will trim the main interest rate by a quarter point on Wednesday, giving way to officials who say an imperative to shore up the labor market should override concerns that inflation for months has been stuck at around 3%, or well above the Fed’s 2% target.

Traders in interest rate futures have increased the odds that the Fed will cut the benchmark interest rate by a quarter point to 87.4% from 66.9.% a month ago, according to the CME FedWatch Tool. The federal funds rate is currently at a range between 3.75% to 4%.

“The Fed will likely continue to allow interest rates to fall because of concerns related to the employment side of their mandate,” the National Federation of Independent Business said Tuesday.

Small business “owners have been frustrated by the lack of qualified workers available to fill their open positions,” the NFIB said.

“Job openings were above the historical average all year, compensation has increased, but few new workers were actually hired” outside of government-supported organizations, the federation said.

Hiring by businesses of all sizes was unchanged at 3.2%, the BLS.

At the same time, several signs that the labor market is cooling have emerged in recent months, with unemployment edging up to 4.4% in September and the pace of hiring slowing.

Unofficial indicators of job market health have also soured in the past several weeks.

“Mid-2026 expectations for labor market conditions remained decidedly negative,” the Conference Board said on Nov. 25, describing results of its monthly consumer confidence survey. Only 27.6% of consumers said jobs were “plentiful,” a decrease of 1 percentage point from October.

The BLS has delayed publishing its November job report to Dec. 16, six days after the meeting of policymakers. The bureau did not publish an employment report for October because of the shutdown.

Anxieties about inflation and the job market bedevil consumers, Joanne Hsu, director of the University of Michigan’s surveys of consumers, said Friday.

Although household sentiment inched up this month compared with November, “the overall tenor of views is broadly somber, as consumers continue to cite the burden of high prices,” Hsu said.

Inflation also vexes small business owners, the NFIB said. The net percentage of small businesses that reported raising prices surged at a record pace last month. Thirty-nine percent of the businesses reported higher average prices, an increase of 8 percentage points from October.