Editor's Note: This report is based on survey data from March 2024 that was published in April 2024. This is the most recent data available. (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics)
US employers had another banner month on the hiring front, adding 303 thousand new jobs, while the unemployment rate ticked back down a tenth of a point to 3.8%.
Not only did these job figures exceed expectations, they did so by more than 50% over the approximate 200 thousand jobs that economists were forecasting.
It’s also worth noting that this report marks the 26th consecutive report with the US average unemployment rate below 4% - which is the longest such streak in nearly half a century.
The healthcare industry saw the largest number of new jobs added last month, with 72 thousand new payroll entries, which is a 20% increase over the 60 thousand new jobs the healthcare industry has averaged over the last 12 months.
Government jobs had the next largest increase adding 71 thousand new jobs, which was up by more than 30% above its 54 thousand average monthly job additions.
The construction industry also added a significant number of jobs at plus 39 thousand, which is more than two times its monthly average - a trend that was matched by the other services industry, which added 16 thousand jobs last month, doubling the monthly average it has recorded over the past year.
While the social assistance industry saw growth as well, the pace was much slower than usual with the addition of just 9 thousand new jobs last month relative to its monthly average of 22 thousand.
Perhaps most noteworthy of all the industries that recorded job growth last month, however, is the leisure & hospitality industry, which added 49 thousand jobs last month, beating its 12 month average of 37 thousand, and now finally fully recouping all the jobs the industry lost during the peak of the initial pandemic -4 years in h making.
There was no significant change in employment figures last month in the manufacturing, wholesale, transportation & warehousing, information, finance, professional & business services, mining, natural gas extraction, and quarrying industries.
Average hourly earnings rose by 12 cents to $34.69 last month, which is an increase of three-tenths of a percent. When accounting only for private sector, non-supervisory employees, however, the increase was only 7 cents per hour, bringing the average hourly earnings for this subset of the workforce up to $29.79.
The average workweek increased by one-tenth of an hour to 34.4 hours per week.
Despite this significant job growth including a net upward revision of more than 20 thousand more jobs than were previously reported in January and February, the wage growth remains relatively slow and stable, which will help keep at bay some of concerns about what these strong economic reports will mean for the interest rate cuts that are expected before the end of the year.
This kind of dynamic of job growth without the corresponding wage growth is only possible because of the entrance (or reentrance) into the job market of more than 400 thousand people last month, bringing the labor participation rate up two-tenths of a point to 62.7%.
Still, the strength of this report undoubtedly increases the likelihood that the three interest rate cuts that the Federal Reserve has penciled in for 2024 will fall in the second half of the year, and any similarly strong reports that come over the next few months may very well push at least one of those cuts into 2025.
With prices increasing by a very historically reasonable 3.2% (albeit still above the Fed’s target of 2%) as of the most recent data available, continued strong job growth is a lot more likely to delay and/or decrease the forthcoming rate cuts than another flare up in inflation seems to be, which is a pretty great place for this economy to be in, all things considered
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