Good morning. Four weeks ago the monthly jobs report said the economy went backwards, and The Callout covered it at the time. That number was wrong. The corrected picture changes what you should be doing about hiring this month.
Top story — July’s job losses were revised away
August payrolls rose 162,000, well above the 31,000 average monthly gain of the prior 12 months, and the unemployment rate held at 4.1% (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Employment Situation, August 2026, USDL-26-1435, released 4 September 2026).
The bigger news is in the revisions. July went from minus 23,000 to plus 21,000, a 44,000 upward revision, and June was revised up 11,000 to plus 31,000. Together that is 55,000 more jobs than previously reported. The ugly July print that had everyone talking down the second half never happened.
The line that pays your wages tells a sharper story. Construction added 22,000 jobs in August, which BLS still calls little changed, with nonresidential specialty trade contractors up 8,000. Stretch it to a year and the split is stark: since August 2025 nonresidential specialty trade contractors have added about 86,000 jobs, while residential specialty trade contractors have lost about 20,700 (BLS Table B-1). Same industry, opposite labor markets. Which side of that line you sit on decides whether hiring is getting easier or harder for you, and the national headline cannot tell you.
Quick hits
Your labor costs are rising faster than everyone else’s. Construction average hourly earnings hit $41.66 in August, up 4.2% over the year, against 3.1% for the private sector overall. Average weekly earnings in construction are up 5.8% to $1,645.57, because hours rose too (BLS Table B-3). A cooling economy still is not buying you cheaper techs.
The rate is flat, but fewer people are stuck part-time. Unemployment held at 4.1% with 7.0 million people out of work, participation edged up to 61.6% and is still down half a point since January, and the number working part time because they could not get full-time hours fell by 414,000 to 4.4 million.
Factories are hiring, which is your commercial pipeline. Manufacturing added 16,000 jobs and is up 58,000 since a December 2025 low, led by machinery and fabricated metal products, up 6,000 each. Plants that are staffing up are plants that are building, and that mechanical, electrical and pipe work gets quoted by somebody.
The Tip — Re-price your hiring plan for your half of the market
Pull your last three months of won work and split it: residential against commercial, industrial, institutional or public. If you are mostly residential, the year’s numbers say your competitors are shedding people, so hiring should be getting easier and you have room to be choosy on rate. If you are mostly nonresidential, the opposite is true and every good tech you are circling has options. Then check it against pay. Construction wages are running at 4.2% a year. If your last raise round was 3%, you are quietly falling behind the market and your best people can already see it. Budget the gap now rather than paying a replacement premium in November.
Tool watch — [Not sponsored]
Skip the headline coverage and read two tables yourself. BLS Table B-1 breaks construction into residential and nonresidential specialty trade contractors, which is the split above, and it takes 30 seconds to find. BLS Table B-3 gives construction hourly and weekly earnings, the number to benchmark your own pay scale against. Both are free, both update on the first Friday of every month, and the next one lands Friday 2 October. No one paid for this mention.
That’s the callout. See you next time.
Sources: BLS — The Employment Situation, August 2026, USDL-26-1435 · BLS Table B-1 — employees on nonfarm payrolls · BLS Table B-3 — average hourly and weekly earnings