Sources & References
Metro Job Market Pulse · Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, IL-IN-WI MSA · October 2026
Every advertised-pay, job-posting and industry figure in this briefing comes from WageScape's own database of active job postings. The sources below back the external facts cited in the written analysis.
Sources cited in this report
This Month's Takeaways
Illinois labor force contracted from 6.57M to 6.48M between March and August 2026
Moody's Analytics / Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability — Illinois labor force and employment analysis
Illinois financial activities sector lost 15,800 jobs year-over-year
Illinois Department of Employment Security — Sector-level payroll employment data
Local Economic Conditions
Chicago metro unemployment at 5.2% in August 2026, up 0.7 pts YoY
USAFacts / BLS — Metro-level unemployment rate data
Chicago recorded record YoY nonfarm job count; Lake County 8 months of growth
Illinois Department of Employment Security — State labor market data release
Looking Ahead
Illinois WARN notices total 91 filings, 16,782 workers year-to-date 2026
Illinois Department of Employment Security WARN database — State WARN Act notice tracking
National wage growth slowed to 3.0% vs 3.4% inflation
Bureau of Labor Statistics — National average hourly earnings and CPI data
How the numbers are calculated
- Advertised pay is the median of the pay ranges employers publish in active job postings in this metro. It is not survey or payroll data.
- Percent changes compare the latest six full months with the six months before that, for the same metro and sector.
- Sectors group postings by the employer's industry (NAICS) classification into ten sectors. Where a metro has too few postings in a sector, the state figure is used instead.
- Role pay trends use the same comparison windows. "Stable" means a change of less than 3%; "moderate" 3–10%; "significant" more than 10%.
Official data for comparison