U.S. employers hired robustly in April, showing continued confidence in the economy even as President Donald Trump’s tariffs on U.S. trading partners made consumers and investors shudder.
The economy added 177,000 jobs, just a tick lower than the 185,000 added in March and much higher than the 135,000 economists had expected. Major job gains took place in health care, transportation and warehousing, and financial services.
Federal government employment shrank by 9,000 in April as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to slash federal jobs. Since January, federal payrolls have shrunk by 26,000. (Workers on paid leave are counted as employed in the data.)
The unemployment rate remained at 4.2%. The labor force, which includes people working and those looking for jobs, grew by 518,000.
Wage growth was flat, with average hourly earnings rising 3.8% from a year ago.
The jobs report is among the first pieces of hard data since Trump’s early April tariff announcement, and indicates that, at least for now, businesses’ complaints and consumer pessimism about tariffs’ disruptive nature have not translated into a hiring slowdown.
The survey on which the jobs report is based was conducted in mid-April, the week after “Liberation Day” tariffs were announced.
“In other words, the establishment survey and the household survey were carried out during a week with extreme levels of uncertainty for businesses,” Apollo chief economist Torsten Sløk noted earlier this week.
One reason may be companies’ experience at the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020, when employers laid off millions of workers only to have trouble rehiring soon after during the tightest job market in decades.
“They laid millions of these people off, and they had a hell of a time getting them back to work,” Boston College economist Brian Bethune told the Associated Press. “So for now, the unemployment rate and the number of people filing claims for jobless benefits every week remain low by historical standards.”
