U.S. employers eased up on hiring recently. Employers added roughly 143,000 workers to payrolls in January 2025, according to a survey of businesses by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those additions were well below the upwardly revised 307,000 jobs added in December and under the 170,000 job additions expected by economists for January. Still, the U.S. economy has added jobs for 49 consecutive months, the second-longest period of job base expansion on record dating back to 1939. Job growth in January was concentrated in Education/Health Servies (+61,000 jobs), Trade/Transportation/Utilities (+38,000 jobs) and Government (+32,000 jobs), while Professional/Business Services (-11,000 jobs), Mining/Logging (-7,000 jobs) and Leisure/Hospitality Services (-3,000 jobs) were the only major industries to lose jobs during the month. For the year-ending January 2025, employers added roughly 2 million jobs or an average 168,000 jobs a month. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate (U3 or headline unemployment rate, which is seasonally adjusted, and is a survey of households) has fallen for two consecutive months, registering at an eight-month low of 4% in January.
This post is part of a series analyzing employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For more on this data, read previous posts on Job Growth.
