U.S. Economy
Employers added 151,000 jobs in February, up from 143,000 in January. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.1 percent.
Monthly change in jobs
+0
+100,000
+200,000
+300,000
Feb.
’24
March
April
May
June
July
Aug.
Sept.
Oct.
Nov.
Dec.
Jan.
’25
Feb.
+151,000 jobs
in February
Note: Data is seasonally adjusted.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
By Karl Russell
Talmon Joseph Smith
It could be the calm before a storm, or it may be business as usual.
U.S. employers added 151,000 jobs in February, the first full month under the new Trump administration, extending a streak of job growth to 50 months. The unemployment rate rose to 4.1 percent, from 4 percent.
Is DOGE playing a role? The survey showed a decline of 10,000 in federal employment. But the report was based on surveys conducted in the second week of February, and economists say the administration’s mass firings, buyouts and hiring freezes at federal agencies may not fully surface in the monthly data until sometime this spring.
What about tariffs? A similar wait is in store for those hoping to ascertain the effects that President Trump’s tariffs — both those imposed and those still threatened — may have on global trading partners, business investment and employment.
Zooming out: Even without the shake-up in foreign trade and federal employment, private-sector hiring has slowed substantially from the blowout pace of 2021 to 2023. That has left labor market analysts and financial commentators gearing up for a potential cooling in economic growth this year.
Context: For now, unemployment continues to glide just above record lows. And gains in average hourly earnings for workers have kept up a solid pace, overtaking inflation since mid-2023.
What they’re saying: The stock market reacted to the report positively, as did most economists. “This is a fundamentally healthy labor market, continuing its earlier momentum, albeit at a slightly slower pace,” said Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan.
“A detox period”: In an interview Friday morning with CNBC before the release of the data, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent asserted that financial markets and the economy overall had become too reliant on government spending and there is “going to be a detox period” going forward, prompted by Trump administration cutbacks. Other Trump advisers, including Elon Musk, have also issued such warnings. “Could we be seeing that this economy that we inherited starting to roll a bit? Sure,” Mr. Bessent said.
Ben Casselman
Jobs reports are always backward-looking, in that they reflect data collected weeks earlier. But this one really feels like a look back at an earlier era, before all the disruptions of the past few weeks.
Danielle Kaye
Major U.S. stock indexes fell at the start of trading, with the S&P 500 opening roughly 0.2 percent lower. The moves are muted compared with the swings earlier this week, as investors grappled with shifting tariff policies from the Trump administration. “If nothing else, markets will be happy for this (likely short) respite in volatility,” noted Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management.
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Lydia DePillis
As a taste of what we may see in the coming months, the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas clocked 172,017 layoffs last month, concentrated among federal agencies. That’s the highest number it had seen since July 2020, in the middle of the pandemic.
Lydia DePillis
The leisure and hospitality sector dropped 16,000 jobs in February. The big decrease was at bars and restaurants, which shed 27,500 positions.
Lydia DePillis
Food services and drinking establishments only regained their prepandemic employment level last September, and remain just slightly above it.
Lydia DePillis
The tick up in the unemployment rate underscores the difficult hiring landscape facing recently laid off federal workers, though their opportunities vary widely by profession and location, as Colby and I wrote this morning.
Talmon Joseph Smith
The public sector overall experienced net job growth. A loss of 10,000 jobs for the federal government paired with a 21,000 gain for state and local governments. Experts say that we should expect the slew of federal firings to show up in the data over the next couple of months.
Change in jobs in February 2025, by sector
Education and health
+73,000 jobs
Construction
+19,000
Government
+11,000
Manufacturing
+10,000
Business services
–2,000
Retail
–6,300
Leisure and hospitality
–16,000
Note: Data is seasonally adjusted.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
By Karl Russell
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Lydia DePillis
The slowing pace of employment growth squares with the job openings data for January, which dropped sharply. The job openings rate has been moving sideways recently after dropping precipitously, but the contraction of federal government hiring may push it lower.
Colby Smith
This report is welcome news for the Fed in that it does not show a rapid deterioration of the labor market, but rather a continued cooling. What would spook officials is if jobs growth were to slow sharply or even turn negative, or the unemployment rate were to spike significantly. Right now, the Fed retains the flexibility to approach interest rate cuts cautiously, meaning it is likely to remain on hold.
Unemployment rate
2
4
6
8
10
12
14%
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
4.1%
Note: Data is seasonally adjusted.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
By Karl Russell
Lydia DePillis
The average work week remained at 34.1 hours, matching the low from March of 2020. That’s an indication that labor demand is weaker than the headline payroll jobs number suggests.
Lydia DePillis
Average hourly earnings for private-sector workers rose 0.3 percent over the month, or 4 percent since last year. That’s still strong wage growth, though a slower monthly pace than in January.
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Ben Casselman
The unemployment rate only edged up by a tenth of a point, but other data from the household survey was much weaker. The labor force shrank by 385,000, and employment fell by 588,000.
Ben Casselman
As regular jobs-day watchers know, the data in the report comes from two separate surveys, one of businesses and one of households. The two use different definitions and sometimes tell conflicting stories, as they do this month.
Lydia DePillis
Federal government jobs fell by 10,000, an unusual drop that may have reflected cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency, or at least the hiring freeze that took effect in January.
Lydia DePillis
February’s total for federal government employment, which includes the United States Postal Service, was 3,007,000. Although down from January, that was 22,000 above the number from a year earlier.
Joe Rennison
The stock market is reacting positively to the numbers, with futures on the S&P 500 up around half a percent since the data came out.
Ben Casselman
The numbers are out! Employers added 151,000 jobs in February and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.1 percent.
Ben Casselman
There were small, offsetting revisions to the prior months’ figures. December’s gain was revised up by 16,000 jobs, and January was revised down by 18,000.
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Joe Rennison
Stocks remain muted ahead of the report being released — a brief moment of calm in during a volatile week. Futures on the S&P 500, which give investors the ability to trade before exchanges officially open for trading, traded basically flat early Friday morning.
Colby Smith
The Fed is watching closely for any signs of weakness in the economic data, especially after recent measures tracking consumer sentiment showed a worrisome drop in confidence. The central bank has justified putting interest rate cuts on hold because the economy has not shown signs of cracking. If that were to change, officials would be in a more difficult position given that high inflation has yet to be vanquished.
Talmon Joseph Smith
Yesterday, a report showed that continuing jobless claims — a measure of the number of people out of work for longer periods — edged near a three-year high in January. It suggested that while layoffs remain muted, job seekers are having a harder time.
Lydia DePillis
From that same report, initial jobless claims overall were muted. But they have spiked in recent weeks in Washington, D.C. and among federal workers, albeit from a low base.
Ben Casselman
Comments from a member of President Trump’s cabinet have renewed concerns that the new administration could seek to interfere with federal statistics, possibly including the monthly jobs report.
In an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested that he planned to change the way the government reported data on gross domestic product to remove the impact of government spending.
Mr. Lutnick oversees two major statistical agencies — the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which produces G.D.P. data, and the Census Bureau — but not the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which publishes the jobs report. There is no evidence that he or anyone else in the Trump administration has sought to change or influence any economic statistics published by the statistical agencies.
Still, experts in recent years have warned that statistical agencies’ independence rests more on norms than on statutory protections, and that the agencies could therefore be vulnerable to political interference. They have also expressed concern about the impact that layoffs and budget cuts could have on the statistical agencies, which were already struggling to collect data as survey response rates fell.
“It’s very concerning,” said Nancy Potok, who was chief statistician for the United States during the Obama administration and Mr. Trump’s first term. “It puts the U.S. in the company of countries that are notorious for fudging the numbers to support failed economic policies.”
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Joe Rennison
The U.S. stock market is headed for one of its worst weeks in many months, after a series of dizzying policy shifts on tariffs from the White House. A fresh jobs report on Friday will provide a crucial reading on the strength of the economy, which has become a growing worry for investors.
Futures on the S&P 500 pointed to a subdued start to trading when markets open. The benchmark index has already dropped 3.6 percent so far this week, its worst week since September. It is on course for its third consecutive week of losses, a sharp mood shift since the index hit a record high less than a month ago.
Since then, investors have become worried about the trajectory for economic growth, made worse by tariffs on imports from the country’s largest trading partners. Surveys also showing mounting concern among consumers.
Investors who had hoped that President Trump’s tariff threats were just a negotiating tactic were disappointed on Tuesday when 25 percent tariffs came into force on Mexico and Canada, and an additional 10 percent tariffs on China. Concessions were made on Thursday, suspending the tariffs on many goods from Canada and Mexico, but it failed to stoke a rally.
If the jobs data released on Friday shows a slower pace of hiring in February, it could exacerbate concerns over the economy.
“I think the markets are essentially taking President Trump a bit more seriously on tariffs,” said Jim Caron, chief investment officer of the portfolio solutions group at the Morgan Stanley Investment Institute. He said that despite the recent sell-off, major stock indexes remain close to record highs, and while worries over the economy are rising, the economy remains in good shape.
Much of the sell-off has been driven by big technology companies. Because of their size, even small changes in their stock prices can have a big effect on broad indexes. Since the S&P 500 peaked on Feb. 19, the index has fallen 6.6 percent. A separate measure that gives all of the stocks an equal weight in the index has fallen just 4.4 percent over the same period.
What isn’t clear is whether investors are selling because they see the tide turning for tech companies or because of broader concerns.
“In the last couple of weeks, and maybe for the next couple of weeks, we have gone through a very challenging news cycle,” Mr. Caron said. “We need to get through that and assess how much damage there is to markets.”
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