Good Jobs Report Clears Low Bar
Employers add 115k jobs, unemployment steady in April
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U.S. employers added 115,000 jobs in April after adding 185,000 in March, meaning that employment has now expanded in two consecutive months for the first time since April and May of 2025. One the one hand, this is an encouraging sign for the economy. On the other, we added jobs in every single month from October 2010 to February 2020, all 113 of them, and are we really going to celebrate a two-month growth streak?
The good news is that the unemployment rate held steady at 4.3%, and the prime age (25-54) labor force participation rate remained very high by recent standards.
Digging into the details, the warehouse clubs and supercenters and courier and messengers industries added a collective 56,200 jobs for the month, and healthcare employment continued its unceasing upward climb.
Information (think media and tech) continues to lose jobs, and that’s got a lot to do with a roughly 5% year over year decline in computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting, and related services employment. It’s tempting to chalk this up to AI replacing programming jobs, but tech companies hired a ton of people—arguably too many—during the low interest rate period of 2020 to 2022. Even with recent losses, the industry still employs about 29% more people than it did six years ago.
Maybe the biggest takeaway: the federal government lost another 9,000 jobs in April and now employs fewer people than at any point since 1966. Feds now account for just 1.68% of all jobs. That’s the smallest share since the BLS began collecting this data in 1939.
The Upshot
This was a good enough jobs report. Unemployment remains relatively low and job growth has picked up over the past two months. The big question is if this momentum can hold up under the weight of sky-high gas prices.
What’s Next
This week was packed with data releases, and we’ll cover all of them in today’s Week in Review, our every-Friday post that gives you everything you need to know about the economy in a breezy, five-minute read. That will be out in the next few hours and is just for paying subscribers. If that’s not you and you want it to be, just click the button below: