The first official look at the US labour market after the government shutdown showed a mixed picture on Thursday.

Employers added 119,000 jobs in September, recovering from 4,000 losses in August. Yet the unemployment rate rose to 4.4 per cent, marking the highest level in four years, reported The Washington Post.

Job growth was concentrated in health care, restaurants, and bars, while transportation, warehousing, and federal employment saw declines.

Professional and business services, which cover many white-collar roles, lost 20,000 jobs amid a wave of layoffs.

“The federal government is back open for business, and the U.S. economy was doing surprisingly well heading into the storm,” Chris Rupkey, chief economist at Fwdbonds, reported The Washington Post.

He added, “it is certainly a cautionary tale that the unemployment rate has hit a new high for this economic cycle.”

Analysts cautioned that the figures were already outdated.

“September feels like it was eons ago at this point,” said Daniel Zhao, chief economist at jobs review site Glassdoor. “These numbers are a snapshot from two months ago, and they don’t reflect where we stand now in November.”

The October jobs report was cancelled because of the shutdown, leaving the unemployment rate absent for the first time since 1948.

“That means policymakers (including the Federal Reserve) will be flying partially blind for several more weeks — very bad timing because the economy is so uncertain right now,” said Heidi Shierholz, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

There were warning signs. Hiring is slowing, consumer spending is weakening, debt levels are climbing, and inflation is rising. Economists warned that incomplete autumn data could have hidden serious developments.

Other economic indicators were also affected. Inflation tracking relied on federal workers visiting stores to collect prices. The 43-day shutdown interrupted this process.

Quarterly GDP reporting, scheduled for October 30, remains delayed, as it depends on multiple government and private sources.

“The statistics supply chain is more complicated than most people realise, and delays in some of the more behind-the-scenes data can derail very visible, closely tracked data,” said Jed Kolko, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former commerce department economist. “There is a lot of data that depends on government workers collecting information, and if that doesn’t happen on time, it’s hard to gather retroactively.”

Even with private-sector reports from firms like Indeed and ADP, economists said official Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) data was critical for its industry and geographic breakdowns and the official unemployment rate.

“The BLS jobs report is still the definitive number against which those private-sector measures are judged,” Kolko said. “We need the jobs report to see the full picture, and that’s especially important right now, when different data is pointing in different directions.”