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, meanwhile, 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, the weakest number 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. Health care 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.
