WASHINGTON — U.S. employers added a surprisingly strong 130,000 jobs last month, but government revisions cut 2024-2025 U.S. payrolls by hundreds of thousands.
The unemployment rate fell to 4.3%, the Labor Department said Wednesday.
The report included major revisions that reduced the number of jobs created last year to just 181,000, weakest since the pandemic year of 2020, and less than half the previously reported 584,000.
The job market has been sluggish for months even though the economy is registering solid growth.
But the January numbers came in stronger than the 75,000 economists had expected. Healthcare accounted for nearly 82,000, or more than 60%, of last month’s new jobs. Factories added 5,000, snapping a streak of 13 straight months of job losses. The federal government shed 34,000 jobs.
Average hourly wages rose a solid 0.4% from December to January.
The unemployment rate fell from 4.4% in December as the number of employed Americans rose and the number of unemployed fell.
Weak hiring over the past year reflects the lingering impact of high interest rates, billionaire Elon Musk’s purge last year of the federal workforce and uncertainty arising from President Donald Trump’s erratic trade policies, which have left businesses unsure about hiring.
Dreary numbers have been coming in ahead of Wednesday’s report. Employers posted just 6.5 million job openings in December, fewest in more than five years.
Payroll processor ADP reported last week that private employers added 22,000 jobs in January, far fewer than economists had forecast. And the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that companies slashed more than 108,000 jobs last month, the most since October and the worst January for job cuts since 2009.
Several well-known compan