Black unemployment dropped from 7.0% in September to 6.6% in October, but it was still above the 3.7% rate of white workers, the latest government figures show. Employers were able to add 165,000 payroll jobs during the month, while overall unemployment stood at 4.1%. This made the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ October jobs report appear to be positive, but fewer Black Americans are working according to the report.
Cantrell Dumas, a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, cautioned against celebrating the October jobs report. “Once you get past the numbers, you realize that it’s more smoke and mirrors than anything else,” he said.
For Black workers, 2026 has been an uneven year. Black unemployment was at 7.1% in March and 7.3% in April, before easing to 6.6% in June, 6.3% in July and 6.0% in August. In September it jumped to 7.0%. October’s decline was generally minor.
Black employment declined by 56,000 in October, while the number of Black people outside the labor force increased by 186,000. Participation — the share of people working or actively seeking work — fell from 62.5% to 62.0%. People not looking or unavailable for work generally are not counted as unemployed.
Dumas said it’s unclear where those workers went. Caregiving for family members and entrepreneurship were possibilities, he said.
Among Black adults 20 and older, women’s unemployment went down to 6.5%, but participation fell to 61.3%, and employment declined by 72,000. Men’s unemployment fell to 5.3%, while participation rose to 68.4% and employment increased by 129,000.
For Black teenagers ages 16–19, unemployment rose from 19.9% in September to 23.3% in October, compared to 12.2% for white teens. In October, approximately 625,000 Black teens were employed, and 190,000 were unemployed. Summer data for the 16–24 age group show that young Black workers were predominantly employed in leisure, hospitality, and retail.
In 2025, 18.4% of employed Black men worked in transportation and material-moving occupations like driving forklifts, trucks, and cranes and working in jobs that utilize conveyor systems. Black women were in professional, service, and office work; 26.8% worked in service occupations.
Public-sector jobs used to be where white-collar Black workers could be guaranteed fair pay and stability because it was where antidiscrimination protections were more likely to be enforced. But recent federal workforce cuts have reduced the number of those jobs. Dēmos analyst Daniella Zessoules notes in her blog, “Black Women Are Being Left Behind in a Changing Labor Market,” that public-sector job losses outweighed Black women’s 2025 gains in education and health care, creating a net loss of 79,000 jobs, alongside 45,000 federal jobs lost in 2026.
October brought 42,000 health care jobs and 25,000 transportation and warehousing jobs nationally. But Zessoules says federal cuts and DEI rollbacks were potential contributors to worsening Black employment.
“An economy adding jobs isn’t necessarily an economy creating equitable opportunities,” Zessoules writes. “To understand whether the labor market is working for working people and families, we must look beyond how many jobs are added and ask where jobs are added, where they’re disappearing, and who has a fair chance of finding work.
As a new Congress takes shape,” she continued, “policymakers must focus not only on creating jobs but on ensuring that workers, and Black women in particular, have access to the work they want and dismantling the structural barriers that limit Black women’s ability to thrive in the labor market.”
Dumas urged incoming lawmakers to look at the policies that operated successfully during the post-COVID recovery, when unemployment improved across races. “Look into what policies were in place during a time where Black unemployment was at its all-time low –– and not just Black unemployment, unemployment in general, for all races.”
“What was in place? What had transpired? What was it that boosted the economy to the way or to the point where everyone was within a percentage point of each other? I don’t know, but it was very close in terms of the overall unemployment rate. So, I would think that if I’m a new senator, a new representative, I’d look into policies from when the economy was booming and see if we can copy what was in place then.”
