The old rule says you’re supposed to stop wearing white after Labor Day. For job seekers who spent the summer sending resumes into the void, there’s another piece of September lore worth paying attention to—the job market is supposed to pick back up.
The phenomenon has been dubbed the “September Surge,” a term Fortune was writing about as early as 2023, when it was gaining traction on TikTok.
Friday’s jobs report offered some encouraging signs heading into September. U.S. employers added 162,000 jobs in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while estimates for June and July were revised up by a combined 55,000 jobs. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%.
Kory Kantenga, LinkedIn’s head of economics for the Americas, told Fortune that economists typically adjust labor-market data to remove predictable seasonal swings. But those swings can matter to job seekers, and September is one of them.
“You see more job postings in September than you do any other time during the year, and that happens year after year,” Kantenga said.
A 2025 LinkedIn Economic Graph analysis of labor-market seasonality provided to Fortune found that job postings generally peak in the spring and early summer, often around May, then decline. But the U.S. as well as several other English-speaking and Nordic countries experience another peak around September and October. In the U.S., LinkedIn’s data show postings in August dip 3% below March levels before rising to 14% above March levels in September and 11% above in October.
But LinkedIn also found a mismatch in applications, which typically peak between January and May before declining through much of the rest of the year. Even in countries where postings rise again in the fall, applications generally don’t show the same increase.
Kantenga said that can leave an opening for people who continue looking later in the year.
“If there are only five jobs available, but you’re the only person looking, that’s still not a bad position to be in, assuming that you qualify for one of those roles,” he said.
Separate data from Indeed’s Job Postings Index also shows a seasonal ramp-up that is noticeable around Labor Day and the weeks that follow. That’s when employers begin preparing for the fourth quarter and the holiday season, bringing more demand for workers in areas including retail and transportation and warehousing.
But it’s not much of a surge as some years only show a small September uptick.
“It’s not typically a very large bump that we see in the job postings data,” Cory Stahle, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab, told Fortune.
Still, September can be a good time to restart a job search. Hiring managers and human resources employees take vacations during the summer, Stahle said, which can slow the interview process. September and October come after that summer slowdown but before the holidays begin making scheduling difficult again.
There isn’t one hiring season
The timing also depends heavily on the kind of job someone is looking for. Accounting is one particularly clear example.
Stahle said employers begin ramping up postings in late summer as they prepare for year-end reporting and the coming tax season. Indeed’s datashow accounting postings jumped roughly 21% from July to August last year, he said.
But the field’s hiring calendar stretches well beyond September. Indeed’s data on new accounting postings show recurring swings throughout the year, including sharp increases around the beginning of the year.
Other white-collar employers operate on a different timeline. Kantenga pointed to finance, accounting and other professional-services firms that recruit in September and October for workers who may not actually start until the following summer.
That lag is another reason more postings in September don’t necessarily mean more people will start jobs in September. According to LinkedIn’s 2025 analysis, hiring and job transitions typically peak between July and September, fall sharply in December and rise again in January. Some of that January increase reflects workers who secured jobs during the final months of the previous year but delayed their start dates.
This September is arriving in a slow hiring market
Even if September follows its usual seasonal pattern, job seekers are entering it in a difficult labor market.
LinkedIn’s hiring rate rose just 2% from July to August, according to an analysis Kantenga published Friday following the latest jobs report. Hiring remains more than 20% below its pre-pandemic level, while the number of jobs available per applicant is 6% lower than it was a year ago.
Stahle described the current labor market as roughly in line with, if not slightly weaker than, a year ago. There were 7.3 million job openings in July, he said, slightly more than the roughly 7.1 million openings a year earlier. But Stahle said employers are hiring at a slower pace and taking longer to extend offers to candidates.
“So the jobs are kind of there, but employers [are] maybe not necessarily super eager to bring people in quickly,” he added.
For workers who have already spent months searching, the slow pace is taking a toll. Kantenga said LinkedIn is seeing what he described as a “big crisis of confidence” among job seekers, particularly Gen Z.
A long, unsuccessful search can eventually change how people respond to the labor market, he said. Some stop looking for work, while others decide to return to school. The labor force participation rate edged up to 61.6% in August from 61.4% in July, according to Friday’s BLS report, though it remains half a percentage point below where it stood in January.
Knowing when employers tend to post jobs won’t ultimately change the underlying labor market. But Kantenga said understanding the normal hiring calendar can give job seekers more context about why a search may feel especially difficult at certain points of the year.
“If you’re having a hard time in February, it could just be February,” he said. “It might not just be you.”
The post Job seekers are waiting for the ‘September Surge.’ Economists say there’s something behind the hype and explain why it’s a good time to apply appeared first on Fortune.
