The September jobs report was weak in the way people had been bracing for. Employers added 29,000 jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Friday, and unemployment edged up to 4.2 per cent. The two months before were revised down by a combined 60,000. July now shows a loss of 10,000 jobs. August, first reported as a gain of 162,000, is now 133,000.
The headline will be argued over until the next one arrives. Further down the release is a sentence about a single industry:
Employment in financial activities is down by 129,000 since a recent peak in May 2025, with most of the job loss in insurance carriers and related activities (-90,000).
Since May 2025 the economy as a whole has added about 546,000 jobs. Insurance, a sector of about 2.9 million workers, has lost 90,000 of them over the same stretch. In September it lost another 2,300.
Eleven months, and counting
The bureau's seasonally adjusted series for insurance carriers and related activities has now fallen for 11 consecutive months, starting last November. The sector peaked at 3,025,800 jobs in February 2025. In September it stood at 2,930,400, about 95,000 lower, a fall of 3.2 per cent.
That pace is unusual. This publication compared the decline since May 2025 with every 16-month period in the series, which runs back to 1990. None shows a larger fall, either in the number of jobs or as a share of the workforce. The closest, in percentage terms, ended in March 2005 at 2.8 per cent.
The financial crisis is the obvious comparison, and it is a closer one. Between July 2008 and February 2011, insurance employment fell by 86,800, or 3.6 per cent. That was a deeper cut as a share of the workforce, but it took 31 months. The current decline has already passed it in raw numbers, in about half the time.
Insurance accounts for most of a broader shrinking in finance. Finance and insurance together employed 6,644,600 people in September, down from 6,744,900 in May 2025. Real estate shed about 28,000 jobs over the same period.
Carriers and brokers, together
Insurance carriers and related activities is two industries under one heading. One is the companies that write the policies and pay the claims. The other is the agencies and brokerages that sell the policies, plus claims adjusters, third-party administrators and other businesses that work alongside them. The bureau publishes them separately, one month behind, so the detailed figures below run to August.
Both have been cutting, in nearly equal measure. From May 2025 to August 2026, carrier employment fell from 1,622,600 to 1,574,800, about 47,800 jobs. The agency, brokerage and related side fell from 1,399,300 to 1,358,100, about 41,200.
The two came into this period from different directions. Carriers ended 2019 with 1,635,900 workers, and they are now about 61,000 below that. The broker and agency side grew through the pandemic and after, from 1,197,100 at the end of 2019 to a peak of 1,400,400 in January 2025, a 17 per cent rise. It has given back about a fifth of that gain since.
What the split rules out is a story confined to one corner of the business. This is not just carriers automating claims handling, or brokers consolidating. Both halves of the industry have been shrinking at once.
What the industry said it would do
Every six months the recruiting firm The Jacobson Group and the broker Aon survey insurance carriers about their hiring plans. The latest results, published on 25 August, are hard to square with the payroll data.
Forty-nine per cent of carriers said they planned to increase staff over the next 12 months. Eleven per cent planned to reduce it, up from 7 per cent in January but down from 14 per cent a year earlier. If the respondents followed through, the release said, industry employment would grow by 0.78 per cent over the year.
The release itself carries a hint of how the two pictures fit together. "It seems many companies are hiring to backfill key positions and bring in new talent, rather than hiring for growth, given revenue expectations," said Jeffrey Blair of Jacobson. Aon's Jeff Rieder pointed to lower employee turnover, both voluntary and involuntary. A company that plans to hire, but only to replace some of the people who leave, can tell a survey it is hiring while its headcount shrinks.
The survey's record suggests the plans have run optimistic. Insurance Business, which reviewed the full study, reported on Friday that in July 2025, 13 per cent of property and casualty carriers said they planned to cut staff. A year later, 26 per cent reported having done so. Among life and health insurers, 10 per cent planned cuts and 29 per cent made them. Where companies did plan cuts, automation was the most common reason given.
The individual announcements point both ways. State Farm said last week that it would grow its claims workforce by about 3,000 people, or 10 per cent, starting in 2027. To get there it plans to hire roughly 5,500 people into claims next year, Claims Journal reported, a figure that allows for about 2,500 departures along the way. It cited more complex vehicles and repairs and more severe weather. Payroll data count the net result of announcements like that, and of the quieter decisions not to fill a seat.
The price stopped rising first
The other series worth reading next to the jobs data is the price of a policy.
The consumer price index for motor vehicle insurance rose 48 per cent between December 2019 and August 2026. All of that increase came before 2025. Then the increases stopped. The index was essentially flat through 2025, peaked in December, and has fallen 5.3 per cent since. In August it was 5.1 per cent lower than a year earlier.
Insurance employment peaked in February 2025, about when that run of increases ended. The timing fits an industry that hired while premiums were climbing and began cutting once they stopped. It does not prove that is what happened. Home insurance has not followed the same path: the index for tenants' and household insurance was 4.1 per cent higher in August than a year earlier.
Other explanations are on offer. Julie Hill, dean of the University of Wyoming College of Law, has argued that much of the job loss in banking traces back to margin pressure: when borrowing costs rise, interest margins and profits at banks and insurers are squeezed and payroll is often the first expense cut, Insurance Business reported from her interview with Marketplace. That fits the start of the cycle better than the present. Interest rates were on hold or falling for almost all of the period in which insurance jobs fell, until the Federal Reserve raised them on 16 September. Automation is the reason the industry itself gives most often for planned cuts. The payroll data cannot tell these explanations apart. They count jobs, not reasons.
The rest of the report
Elsewhere in the report, health care added 17,000 jobs in September, about half its 12-month average of 33,000. Construction added 11,000. Manufacturing added 9,000 and is up 72,000 since December. Average hourly earnings rose 5 cents to $37.81, and are 3.0 per cent higher than a year ago. The unemployment rate has stayed between 4.1 and 4.3 per cent since March.
This publication reported on Wednesday that the hires rate has been stuck in a narrow, low range for 30 months. In a market where few employers are hiring, a worker who loses a job is slow to find another. Insurance has lost an average of between 5,000 and 6,000 jobs a month since May 2025. That is too few to move the national unemployment rate, and it is spread across many employers and many places. For the people in those offices, a year and a half of it is a different labour market.
The next readings come on 6 November, with the October jobs report, and in January, when Jacobson and Aon next survey carriers. If the pattern holds, the survey will again say the industry intends to grow. The payroll count is the one to watch.
Payroll, unemployment, revision, health care, manufacturing, earnings and financial activities figures, and the quoted language, are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Situation release for September 2026 (2 October 2026), read on bls.gov. Industry employment series for insurance carriers and related activities (CES5552400001), insurance carriers (CES5552410001), insurance agencies, brokerages and related activities (CES5552420001), finance and insurance, and total nonfarm payrolls were retrieved from the BLS public data API and FRED; all are seasonally adjusted. The detailed carrier and brokerage series are published one month behind and run to August 2026. The losing streak, the peak-to-date and May-to-date changes, the comparison with every 16-month period since 1990, and the 2008-2011 comparison are this publication's calculations from those series. The motor vehicle insurance and tenants' and household insurance price indexes are BLS consumer price index series (CUSR0000SETE, seasonally adjusted, and CUUR0000SEHD), through August 2026; the percentage changes are ours. The hiring-plan figures and the quotations from Jeffrey Blair and Jeff Rieder are from the Jacobson Group and Aon press release on the Q3 2026 Insurance Labor Market Study (Business Wire, 25 August 2026). The comparison between the July 2025 survey's planned cuts and the cuts reported a year later, and the finding that automation is the most common reason given, are as reported by Insurance Business (2 October 2026); the full study was not read. State Farm's hiring figures are from Claims Journal (25 September 2026). Julie Hill's comments are as reported by Insurance Business from an interview with Marketplace. Accurate to 3pm ET on 2 October 2026.
Topics businesslabor marketinsuranceemployment
