October surge in hiring lowers veterans’ unemployment to 2.7%

The jobless rate for veterans fell to a stunning 2.7% in October as employers added 165,000 hires, far exceeding market estimates of 60,000-65,000 non-farm jobs, according to the monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The overall jobless rate ticked down from 4.2% in September to 4.1%, BLS said, while the jobless rate for all veterans fell from 3.5% in September to 2.7%. The unemployment rate for the nation’s post-9/11 generation of veterans also came down from 4.1% in September to 3.4% in October, the BLS report said.

The data for the report was collected in mid-October, well before the historic midterm losses suffered by the Republican Party, and the massive stock market selloff Thursday that saw the Dow drop by more than 1,800 points and the Nasdaq plunge 5.5% in what amounted to a gut check for the artificial intelligence and data center boom. The selloff erased $2.3 trillion in market value.

But markets appeared to stabilize in early trading Friday. The S&P 500 was up 72 points, or nearly 1%, erasing losses after it suffered its worst day since April 2025 on Thursday, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite rose 437 points, or 1.8%.

The BLS report showed employment increased in professional and business services, adding 70,000 jobs, and in health care, adding 40,000 jobs.

“It’s a strong report,” Heather Long, chief economist for the Navy Federal Credit Union, said in a phone interview with Military Times. “It’s strong in every dimension.”

“Inflation is still wiping out wage gains,” she said, “but more people are coming into the labor force. The big surprise was the hiring in professional and business services,” she said, suggesting that white-collar jobs could be making a comeback.

Kevin Rasch, a retired Navy Commander and the Warriors to Work Regional Director for the Wounded Warrior Project, said in a phone interview with Military Times that he always takes the government reports with a grain of salt, but the BLS report Friday reflected some of the success the Wounded Warrior Project was having in job placements.

“We’re still being very successful,” he said, but it remained to be seen how the grassroots movement against the data centers might impact the job market. “It will be interesting to see how that plays out,” he said.

“I hate data centers,” Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa, D-Texas, said on CNN Thursday night. “I hate the way they’re taking advantage of Texans.” Yet President Donald Trump has maintained that opponents of the data centers would be cutting themselves off from unfathomable riches if they succeeded in canceling their construction.

In a Truth Social post Monday, Trump said that communities mounting opposition to the server warehouses “want to end up backwards and poor. If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame,” Trump wrote. “China could not be happier with the anti- Data Center movement.”