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

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 .