Jobs Week Opens With a Hike Roughly Half-Priced: JOLTS and ISM Tuesday, August Payrolls Friday

by Alina Castellanos · August 31, 2026

Economics Correspondent, US Market Current

The first full data week of September begins on Tuesday, and it arrives with more riding on it than any comparable week this summer. Third-party compilations of futures pricing have moved a September rate increase from a tail risk to something near a coin flip, and the labour and activity releases scheduled between Tuesday and Friday are the first of two clusters the Federal Open Market Committee will see before it meets on September 16. The second is the price data: the Bureau of Labor Statistics has the August Producer Price Index down for September 10 and the August Consumer Price Index for September 11.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is scheduled to publish the August Employment Situation at 8:30 a.m. ET on Friday, September 4, according to the agency's schedule of selected releases for September 2026. The same schedule puts the July Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey at 10:00 a.m. ET on Tuesday, September 1, and revised second-quarter Productivity and Costs at 8:30 a.m. ET on Thursday, September 3. The Institute for Supply Management's release calendar places its Manufacturing PMI report at 10:00 a.m. ET on Tuesday, September 1 and its Services PMI report at 10:00 a.m. ET on Thursday, September 3. A week-ahead calendar published by FinancialJuice — a secondary compilation rather than an issuing agency — also lists the ADP National Employment Report for 8:15 a.m. ET on Wednesday, September 2, and S&P Global's final August manufacturing and services purchasing managers' indexes at 9:45 a.m. ET on Tuesday and Thursday respectively.

The baseline is already soft

The starting point for Friday's report is weak. In the July Employment Situation, released August 7, the BLS reported that both nonfarm payroll employment, at -23,000, and the unemployment rate, at 4.1 per cent, changed little in July. The revisions were the harder part of that release: the BLS said "The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for May was revised down by 66,000, from +129,000 to +63,000, and the change for June was revised down by 37,000, from +57,000 to +20,000" — 103,000 jobs subtracted from the prior two months.

Wage growth in the same release was modest. The BLS reported average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls at $37.62, little changed at plus two cents on the month, and up 3.2 per cent over the year. The labour force participation rate was 61.4 per cent and the average workweek was unchanged at 34.3 hours.

Tuesday's JOLTS release covers July and follows a June report, published August 4, in which the BLS found that "The number and rate of job openings were little changed at 7.4 million and 4.4 percent." Hires were unchanged at 5.3 million, a rate of 3.4 per cent; total separations changed little at 5.4 million and 3.4 per cent; quits were unchanged at 3.2 million and 2.0 per cent; and layoffs and discharges were unchanged at 1.8 million and 1.1 per cent. The June release also noted downward revisions of 57,000 to May job openings alongside upward revisions of 82,000 to hires and 159,000 to total separations.

Manufacturing is the outlier

The activity data have been telling a different story from the payroll data. The July ISM Manufacturing PMI, released on August 3, registered 55.6 per cent, up 2.3 percentage points from June's 53.3 per cent. Susan Spence, MBA, chair of the ISM Manufacturing Business Survey Committee, said in that release that "The Manufacturing PMI® registered 55.6 percent in July, 2.3 percentage points above the June figure and the highest reading since May 2022 (55.9 percent)."

The July internals were broadly strong: New Orders at 56.7 per cent, Production at 58.5 per cent after a 6.3-point jump, Employment back above the neutral line at 52.8 per cent from 49.7 per cent, Supplier Deliveries at 58.9 per cent, Inventories at 51.2 per cent and Backlog of Orders at 55.0 per cent from 50.5 per cent. The one index that cuts against the Fed is Prices, which eased to 71.1 per cent from 73.0 per cent but remains far above the 50 line that separates rising from falling input costs.

That combination — a manufacturing survey at multi-year highs, a factory employment index back in expansion, and a national payroll count that went slightly negative in July — is what makes Tuesday's manufacturing release and Friday's payroll print harder to read as a pair than usual. The ISM figure is a diffusion index of the direction of change, not a count of jobs, and the two have diverged before.

The policy stakes

The Federal Open Market Committee left the federal funds target range at 3-1/2 to 3-3/4 per cent on July 29, but the vote was 9-3, with Beth M. Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie K. Logan each preferring a quarter-point increase. The statement said that "Economic activity is expanding at a solid pace despite elevated uncertainty that owes, in part, to the conflict in the Middle East," that "Job gains have kept pace with the workforce, and the unemployment rate has changed little," and that "Productivity growth and capital investment are strong."

Chair Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole keynote on August 28 leaned on the same labour-market reading to justify a focus on prices. He said that "Labor markets are quite stable" and that "The jobless rate, at 4.1 percent, remains low by historical standards," adding that "People who want to work, by and large, are holding or finding jobs...I believe the labor markets are consistent with full employment." On inflation he said the 12-month change in the PCE price index stands at 3.7 per cent and the six-month change at 4.1 per cent, and that "Inflation is running above our 2 percent target. So the Fed's predominant focus right now should be on prices."

Markets repriced accordingly. Bitcoin.com News reported that the CME Group's FedWatch tool showed a 57 per cent probability of a quarter-point increase at the September 16 meeting as of August 28, against 43 per cent for a hold, and 39.9 per cent as recently as August 21; the same report put the projected range at 3.75 to 4.00 per cent if the Committee moves. Kalshi's news arm, writing on August 29, reported 47 per cent on its own contract for a 25-basis-point increase against 54 per cent for a hold, up from about 30 per cent for a hike beforehand, and cited, via CNBC, a CME FedWatch reading of 55.7 per cent. Those are third-party readings of derivatives and prediction markets, not Federal Reserve guidance, and the two accounts of the same CME tool for broadly the same date — 57 per cent and 55.7 per cent — are themselves a reminder that a headline probability depends on when it was sampled.

The practical consequence is that Friday's payroll number carries an asymmetry it did not carry in July. A labour market Warsh has already described as consistent with full employment gives the hawks room to act on prices; a second consecutive negative payroll print, or another set of downward revisions on the scale of May and June's, would complicate that reading two weeks before the decision.