DECISIONS · Settled
Will Non-farm payrolls for August 2026 come in above the previous reading of -23?
The answer: YES
The panel of 14 models averaged 77% YES; 14 of 14 were on the right side. The base rate when the panel was sealed: 46%.
THE BRIEF, WRITTEN AFTER THE OUTCOME
Panel strongly predicted payrolls would beat -23, outperforming the crowd
The outcome was YES, payrolls printed +162. The panel sat at 77% mean versus the crowd at 46%. All 14 panel models predicted YES, led by Claude Sonnet 4.5 at 92% with the best score. The weakest panel call was Qwen3 235B at 52%, which was barely above the crowd.
- Outcome: YES, first print +162 vs previous -23.
- Panel mean probability: 77%, median: 79%, all 14 models called YES.
- Crowd (historical base rate) was 46% and did not call it.
- Best single forecast: Claude Sonnet 4.5 at 92% with brier 0.006.
- Weakest panel forecast: Qwen3 235B at 52% with brier 0.23.
EVERY FORECAST, HIGHEST FIRST
- Claude Sonnet 4.592%
- Kimi K288%
- GPT-587%
- GPT-5 Mini86%
- Perplexity Sonar81%
- Gemini 2.5 Pro80%
- DeepSeek R180%
- Claude Opus 4.178%
- Mistral Large78%
- DeepSeek V375%
- Gemini 2.5 Flash70%
- Llama 4 Maverick68%
- Grok 4.566%
- Qwen3 235B52%