US unemployment rate rounds up to 4.4% in October, Chicago Fed estimates

(Reuters) -The U.S. jobless rate likely edged up in October to the highest in four years as the hiring rate for unemployed workers slowed and the rate of layoffs and other job separations increased, according to an estimate by the Chicago Fed released Thursday.

The regional Fed bank estimated the unemployment rate climbed to 4.36% last month - 4.4% on the rounded basis typically reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics - from 4.35% in September.?

The bank has been providing twice-monthly estimates of the jobless rate since shortly before a now-record-long federal government shutdown cut off the flow of published reports on the economy from the BLS, Bureau of Economic Analysis and Census Bureau. The last U.S. jobless figure published by the BLS, for August, put the rate at 4.3% - the highest since October 2021 when it was 4.5%.

"The October 2025 reference week (October 12th through October 18th) for the BLS survey used to estimate the unemployment rate overlapped with the federal government shutdown that began in early October," the Chicago Fed said. "This special factor is likely to be only partially reflected in the October 2025 Final release of the Chicago Fed Labor Market Indicators. The Congressional Budget Office expects that as many as 750,000 federal government workers have been furloughed during the government shutdown, representing up to 0.4 percent of the civilian labor force (as of August 2025 data)."

(Reporting By Dan Burns; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama )