What time are JOLTS, Factory Orders, and the Beige Book today (Sept. 3, 2025)? A practical guide to the U.S. economic calendar

If you’re tracking the U.S. economic calendar for September 3, 2025, three releases should be on your screen: JOLTS job openings and Factory Orders at 10:00 a.m. ET, and the Federal Reserve Beige Book at 2:00 p.m. ET. This combination delivers a broad read on labor demand, manufacturing trends, and real-time business anecdotes—exactly the mix investors and economists use to refine expectations before Friday’s Employment Situation.

JOLTS (10:00 a.m. ET): The job-openings tally, alongside quits and layoffs, is a clean way to gauge labor-market tightness beyond payroll counts. A modest decline in openings would reinforce the picture of cooling labor demand and gradually easing wage pressure. Sector splits matter: professional and business services, health care, and leisure/hospitality can tip the balance on the wage-inflation debate. Some forecasters look for job openings to hover in the mid-7-million range; if the data overshoots, it may complicate the “disinflation with benign wages” narrative ahead of the Fed’s next decisions.

Factory Orders (10:00 a.m. ET): This report extends the manufacturing M3 picture beyond the advance durable-goods snapshot by folding in nondurables and more detailed revisions. With aircraft bookings notoriously choppy, most attention falls on core capital goods and shipments—proxies for equipment investment in GDP. A soft July would be consistent with a sector that’s stabilizing rather than booming; firmer core data would suggest businesses are still spending despite higher financing costs and tariff-related price noise earlier in the summer.

Beige Book (2:00 p.m. ET): The Fed’s district-by-district survey distills thousands of business contacts into a narrative about prices, wages, demand, and credit. Keywords to watch in today’s edition include “slowing,” “moderate,” or “stable” when describing price changes and labor churn; any broadening of those terms would support the case for diminishing inflation pressure. Conversely, persistent reports of worker shortages in skilled categories or sustained pricing power would argue for caution on the pace of rate cuts.

Two schedule quirks help frame the day. First, MBA mortgage applications hit early and offer a weekly view of housing demand as mortgage rates and affordability ebb and flow. Second, because of Monday’s Labor Day holiday, the EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report slips to Thursday, not today—handy context for anyone mapping energy inventories to inflation narratives. Treasury auctions and scattered Fed-speak can nudge yields, but the market’s economic focus is squarely on 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. releases.