A host of alternative jobs data from Wall Street are pointing in the same direction: The U.S. labor market is losing steam.

These numbers are getting more attention while the federal government shutdown keeps the lights off at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, delaying new data in an unsettled time for the jobs market.

In the federal data void, Bank of America this week said it is seeing signs of rising unemployment and slowing job growth in its customers' data. Private-equity company Carlyle Group, extrapolating from companies in which it owns stakes, said Tuesday that it thinks overall U.S. jobs growth slid in September from an already weak official reading in August. Goldman Sachs said its measure of labor-market tightness fell last month back to levels seen in 2015, indicating a tough landscape for job seekers.

These follow a report from payroll processor ADP last week that said U.S. employers shed private-sector jobs last month.

These and other alternative data sources have their drawbacks -- they often only cover a small share of the labor force and using them to estimate the state of the broader job market can be tricky. These numbers don't always match with government data, though the government numbers themselves have seen some steep revisions lately as the BLS struggles with falling response rates to its surveys.

Still, the nongovernment numbers are telling the same basic story about a job market that has cooled since the spring: Few companies are hiring.

"The employment numbers have clearly deteriorated," said Jake Oubina, senior economist at Piper Sandler. Profit margins are down because of tariffs, and that makes companies less likely to hire, he said.

Economists and investors are closely watching nongovernment data while the federal shutdown delays important federal data releases, including a September jobs report that was supposed to come out last Friday. That report, one of the key U.S. economic indicators, helps set the course for the Federal Reserve's interest rate policy. The Fed last month lowered interest rates by a quarter percentage point and indicated more cuts are coming while citing weak hiring.

The good news is that few people are getting laid off while the U.S. unemployment rate, last released for August, remained low. Piper Sandler tallied state-level unemployment claims and found they remained low last week. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said job-cut announcements fell in September.

Lower immigration means fewer jobs need to be added to keep unemployment steady, said Jason Thomas, Carlyle Group's head of global research and investment strategy. Considering this, the labor market is "probably pretty healthy," he said.

Still, Carlyle's own data suggest hiring has slowed significantly. The firm estimated that U.S. employers added 17,000 jobs in September, down from an already weak 22,000 in August. Carlyle draws its estimates from head-count and business volumes data among the firms where it has some ownership, which it weights based on how they correlated with the BLS jobs report in the past.

Bank of America parses its customers' bank and credit card accounts to see who is receiving wages or unemployment benefits to gauge the state of the labor market. The bank found a "further softening" in job growth in September and a 10% rise in unemployment payments in October compared with a year ago, although wages also rose.

Elsewhere, the Institute for Supply Management, a professional organization that polls supply-chain executives, found that services employment shrank in September. That marked the fourth straight month of declines.

Other surveys show signs of a worsening climate for job seekers. In a survey of consumers by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, respondents put the odds of finding a job in the next three months at 47.4% last month, up slightly from August but also well below the trailing 12-month average of 51%.

The think tank Conference Board's labor differential, the share of survey respondents who say jobs are plentiful minus the share who say jobs are hard to get, fell in September.