The US economy added more jobs than expected in April (177,000 vs. estimates of 138,000) while the unemployment rate held steady at 4.2%, signalling the labor market's resiliency after Trump's "Liberation Day" tariff announcements.
Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter Allie Canal sits down with Brad Smith and Madison Mills on Morning Brief to take a closer look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics data by sector, highlighting that Federal government jobs fell, due to DOGE-related cuts, while other sectors added jobs.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Morning Brief here.
The April jobs report crossing this morning showing 177,000 jobs added during the month of April. The unemployment rate staying steady at 4.2% and average hourly earnings coming in just a light, a little bit light of expectations. The growth their year over year, 3.8%. Our very own Alexandra Canal joins us now for a deeper dive into the numbers. Ally, let's start with some of the government jobs because that was one of the hot areas that of course everybody was looking at coming into this report.
Yeah, over the past few months, we've been continuing to track the impact of those dodge layoffs within federal government. Uh we saw that decline by 9,000 in April. We're down about 26,000 since January. We did see an uptake in state and local government jobs, so that was able to offset some of those federal losses, which is why we saw overall government add 10,000 jobs. Now, generally federal workers are required to give 60 days notice before they are let go. So this suggests that we are likely to see federal layoffs ramp up significantly later this month. So future job reports, that's going to give us further clues about the pain that we could see here. Now, Oxford Economics is assuming about 200,000 federal job losses in 2025. Since January, we are at 26,000. So significantly more pain ahead, and that also includes about 75,000 workers who do ultimately end up accepting the administration's resignation offer. Now, another sector that I want to call out is healthcare. Continues to be one of the stronger, strongest sectors within this economy. We added 51,000 jobs in April. That's about the same as the average monthly gain that we've seen over the past 12 months. Within healthcare, we did see growth continue in hospitals along with ambulatory healthcare services. Another notable increase, though, is employment in transportation and warehousing. That increased by a whopping 29,000 in April, following little change the previous month. So very significant rebound here. And just to note, the average over the past 12 months for this sector in particular has been about 12,000. So more than doubling that average in April. Those gains were concentrated in warehousing and storage, carriers and messengers, along with air transportation. So to me, my mind immediately goes to a lot of the front loading that we saw from these companies at surge and imports to try and get away from these tariffs, circumvent them as much as possible. And then quick honorable mentions, we saw leisure and hospitality increase, construction jobs increase, and then for some of the biggest losers, retail trade declined by 2,000, whereas motor vehicle and parts decreased by 5,000.
All right, Ally. Thank you so much for that overview. Really appreciate you breaking down the sector action for us.
