(Radio Iowa) – The government shutdown impacted the workers who compiled the federal data that figures out Iowa’s unemployment rate. Iowa Workforce Development spokesman Jesse Dougherty says they will have data for the last two months of the year in January. “The month of October will actually not have, there’s not data there to then compile an unemployment rate, but there is data to compile a job survey,” he explains. “And so what the federal partners have recommended, and what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be releasing October and November data at the same time.” He says November will get things back on track. “November as a whole is going to be a normal month, it’s just that it is taking them longer to compile because it was delay,” he says.

Dougherty says the data from October and November will be released next month. “By the time we hit the first week of the. New Year, we’re gonna have a much better indication of where things are headed in the economy, and that’s something that’s still being compiled,” Dougherty says.

Survey information for September had already been gathered before the government shutdown, and that data was released earlier this month. The September information showed the unemployment rate fell to three-point-seven percent (3.7%), down one-tenth of a percent.