Catenaa, Friday, March 07, 2025- US added over 150,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department said on Friday, offering reassurances that the labor market has remained relatively stable since President Trump took office.
The US added a seasonally adjusted 151,000 jobs in February, slightly below the gain of 170,000 jobs economists polled by The Wall Street Journal expected to see.
The February figures come after the US created 125,000 jobs in January.
Meanwhile, The unemployment rate, which is based on a separate survey from the jobs figures, rose to 4.1% from 4%.
The report also showed a loss of 10,000 federal government jobs over the month, unusual both because it is a decline and because it is such a large one.
Government jobs at the state and local level increased by 21,000.
Report showed that Healthcare accounted for a large portion of the February employment gain, adding 52,000 jobs.
The transportation and warehousing industries added 18,000 jobs. On the other side of the ledger, retailers shed 6,000 jobs, and the leisure and hospitality industries lost 16,000 jobs.
Average hourly earnings rose 0.3% from January, putting them 4% above their year-earlier level.
Economists expect that the combination of government job layoffs, reduced government funding, uncertainty over tariffs and immigration restrictions will at least temporarily weigh on employment growth in the months ahead.
For its jobs figure, the Labor Department surveys employers on how many people they had on their payrolls during the pay period that includes the 12th of the month; anybody who worked at all during that period in February was counted as employed.
That includes federal workers still in their probationary period after getting hired or promoted that the White House began laying off around Feb. 13.
It also includes the roughly 75,000 people who accepted the White House’s “deferred resignation” offer, where the White House said they don’t have to work but can still get paid through the end of September.
Those layoffs will begin showing up in the jobs count in the months ahead. Exactly how many federal government workers have lost their jobs so far as a result of the “Workforce Optimization Initiative” led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is unclear.
