Small Businesses Add 28,000 Jobs in September, Gusto Reports

Small businesses on Gusto's payroll platform added 28,000 jobs in September, according to the company's Small Business Jobs and Pay Report, extending a hiring streak to eight consecutive months.

Gusto, a U.S. payroll and benefits platform, draws the figure from its own customer base of small employers that use the company for pay processing. For job seekers, the headline reading points to where openings cluster: at firms that operate without the dedicated HR departments, formal workforce planning, and quarterly earnings pressure that shape hiring at larger corporates.

What does eight straight months of growth signal?

The persistence of the streak matters more than any single monthly print. Eight consecutive months of net positive hiring indicate that the small-business segment is absorbing workers faster than shedding them. That is a precondition for wage competition, even though Gusto's release title does not break out pay growth by sector or role.

The trend runs counter to the corporate layoff narrative that has dominated recent headlines. Large-employer restructuring has produced the bulk of announced job cuts, while small-firm payrolls have continued to expand. For candidates weighing offers, the gap matters: the segments are not moving in lockstep.

What does the trend mean for individual workers?

Small-business employment tilts toward customer-facing, service, retail, hospitality, and skilled-trades roles — categories where Gusto's customer base is overrepresented. Three practical implications follow for candidates and workers:

• Job seekers targeting service, retail, hospitality, and trades roles face a market segment that is still adding positions rather than closing requisitions.
• Candidates with broad, flexible-skill profiles — operations plus sales, for example — gain an advantage inside small firms, where role boundaries are thinner than at large employers.
• Workers evaluating compensation should treat the eight-month streak as evidence that small employers are not in retrenchment mode, even as larger firms continue restructuring.

How does Gusto's reading compare to official data?

Gusto's employment index comes from its own payroll customer base, a self-selected sample of small businesses on the platform. The release does not specify sample size in its headline. Readers comparing the figure to Bureau of Labor Statistics data should note that Gusto's universe differs from the BLS establishment survey, which covers all employer firms across size classes. The two series will not produce identical monthly numbers, and short-term divergence between them is normal.

Until Gusto releases an updated figure next month, the streak is the headline metric — and the one small-business owners, recruiters, and workers in the segment will most likely watch most closely.