Jobs Still Growing, But the April Payroll Report Had Some Ugly Corners

CNBC, Politico, PBS, NBC News, and Forbes contributed to this report.

The US job market kept adding jobs in April, but the report was far from a clean bill of health.

Employers added 115,000 nonfarm payrolls last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That was well above the 55,000 jobs economists had expected, but still a step down from March’s unusually strong 185,000. The unemployment rate stayed put at 4.3%.

On the surface, that looks fine. Dig a little deeper and the cracks show up fast.

Wage growth came in softer than expected, with average hourly earnings rising just 0.2% in April and 3.6% over the past year. Analysts had been looking for 0.3% and 3.8%, respectively. That matters because it suggests pay is not really running ahead of inflation in a meaningful way.

The mix inside the report was uneven too. Healthcare kept doing the heavy lifting, adding 37,000 jobs. Transportation and warehousing gained 30,000. Retail added 22,000, and social assistance rose by 17,000. But information services lost 13,000 jobs, continuing a slide that has now wiped out 342,000 positions since late 2022. Some economists see artificial intelligence as part of that story, though nobody is calling it a settled answer.

There were also some less cheerful signals under the hood. The labor force shrank by 226,000 people, pushing the participation rate down to 61.8%, the lowest since October 2021. A broader unemployment measure climbed to 8.2%, and the number of people working part time for economic reasons surged by 445,000 to 4.9 million. That is the kind of number that makes labor economists sit up a little straighter.

Revisions were a mixed bag. March payrolls were nudged up by 7,000, while February was marked down by 23,000 to a loss of 156,000 jobs. That means the first quarter was choppier than the headline April number might suggest.

So the story here is not “boom” or “breakdown.” It is more like this: the labor market is still standing, but it is not exactly running hot either.

That was the read from several economists. Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said the job market has been basically stable for about a year and a half, though “stable without being good” is how he put it. Others said the report showed resilience, but not much momentum.

The Federal Reserve will likely see it the same way. With hiring still positive, layoffs relatively low and inflation still sticky, there is not much reason for the central bank to rush into rate cuts. Officials are already split on where policy goes next, and this report does not settle the argument.

Markets liked the print at first. Stocks opened slightly higher and Treasury yields eased. But the bigger takeaway is a familiar one: the economy is holding up better than many feared, even if the engine is sputtering a bit.

The jobs market is still moving. It just does not look nearly as smooth as the headline number might imply.