September jobs report: pay up 3.0% in a year, prices up 3.4%

Average hourly pay for private-sector workers rose 5 cents in September to $37.81, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its Employment Situation report released Friday, October 2, 2026. That is 0.1% for the month and 3.0% over the past 12 months, up from $36.70 in September 2025. For production and nonsupervisory employees, the hourly and rank-and-file workers below the supervisor level, the average rose 7 cents to $32.60, up 3.3% from $31.56 a year earlier.

Prices rose faster. The latest inflation figure out before the report, the August consumer price index, showed prices up 3.4% over 12 months. So for the average private worker, this year's raise bought a little less than last year's paycheck did.

The rest of the report was quiet: employers added 29,000 jobs, the unemployment rate was 4.2%, and July and August were revised down by a combined 60,000 jobs, with July now showing a loss of 10,000. A labor market that slow gives most workers little leverage to push their pay ahead of prices, which is the backdrop for every number below.

September's pay numbers, a year apart

We converted the BLS hourly averages into yearly pay using the payroll convention of 2,080 hours, 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, the same way our hourly to salary calculator does. The inflation row uses the index BLS itself pairs with each group in its real earnings report: CPI-U for all employees, CPI-W (the index for urban wage earners and clerical workers) for production and nonsupervisory workers.

	All private employees	Production and nonsupervisory
Average hourly, Sept. 2025	$36.70	$31.56
Average hourly, Sept. 2026	$37.81	$32.60
Change over 12 months	+$1.11 (3.0%)	+$1.04 (3.3%)
Full-time yearly pay now (× 2,080)	$78,644.80	$67,808.00
Yearly raise in dollars	$2,308.80	$2,163.20
Inflation, 12 months to August	3.4% (CPI-U)	3.5% (CPI-W)
Raise needed to match inflation	$2,595.42	$2,297.57
Shortfall over a full-time year	$286.62	$134.37

To have kept up, the all-employee average would have had to reach about $37.95 an hour rather than $37.81. Fourteen cents an hour doesn't sound like much, and it isn't a crisis, but it is the wrong direction: the BLS real earnings release for August already had real average hourly earnings down 0.3% over the year for all employees and down 0.1% for production and nonsupervisory workers.

A caveat on timing. September wages here are measured against August prices, because September's CPI had not been released when the jobs report came out. That mismatch is normal for anyone reading these reports in real time, and one month rarely moves a 12-month inflation rate by more than a few tenths. Still, read the shortfall as an estimate until BLS publishes real earnings for September.

Most people don't work 2,080 hours

The full-time figures above describe a worker on a 40-hour week. The BLS average is lower. The average workweek for all private employees held at 34.4 hours in September, and production and nonsupervisory employees averaged 33.8 hours, both unchanged from August. Those averages include part-timers, so they pull the typical paycheck well below the 40-hour math.

Average weekly earnings in the report's tables were $1,300.66 for all private employees and $1,101.88 for production and nonsupervisory workers. Over 52 weeks that's $67,634.32 and $57,297.76, about $11,000 and $10,500 less than the 2,080-hour conversion. If you're comparing your own pay with "the average," compare like with like: your hourly rate against $37.81 or $32.60, or your weekly check against the weekly figure, but don't mix them.

Hours are also the one place the report had better news. The average workweek was 34.2 hours a year ago for all employees and 33.7 for production workers, so weekly earnings grew faster than hourly pay: about 3.6% for both groups. For the all-employee average, that's slightly ahead of 3.4% inflation. In other words, the average paycheck kept pace mostly because people worked a few more minutes a week, not because the hour got more valuable. In manufacturing, the workweek stayed at 40.6 hours with 3.0 hours of overtime.

What the raise is worth after taxes

A raise that only matches inflation before taxes falls behind after taxes, because the extra dollars are taxed at your top rate while your whole paycheck is taxed at a blend. Here is the production and nonsupervisory average as a single filer working full time, with 2026 federal rules applied to both years so the only thing that changes is the pay. The old salary of $65,644.80 leaves $49,544.80 of taxable income after the standard deduction, which puts the raise right at the line between the 12% and 22% brackets.

So the gap that was $134.37 before taxes becomes $315.07 after them. In practice the IRS raises the bracket thresholds and standard deduction with inflation every year, which takes back part of that difference, but it shows why a "3% raise in a 3% year" still feels like a pay cut at the grocery store. State income tax, where you have one, widens it a bit more; our take-home pay calculator shows the result for your state and filing status.

Checking your own raise against these numbers

The BLS figure is an average across millions of jobs, and averages move for reasons that have nothing to do with your paycheck. When lower-paid jobs disappear, the average rises even if nobody got a raise; when hiring is concentrated in lower-paid industries, it can lag. Treat 3.0% and 3.3% as the market benchmark, not a promise.

The useful test is simple. Take your hourly rate now and a year ago and divide one by the other. If the result is below 1.034, your pay lost ground to prices over the year to August. At $25.00 an hour, keeping up meant reaching $25.85; at $40.00, $41.36. If you're short, that gap is the number to bring when you ask for a raise, ideally stated as a yearly dollar figure, since $0.85 an hour on a full-time schedule is $1,768 a year.

The next Employment Situation report, for October, is scheduled for Friday, November 6, 2026.

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