The U.S. job market is healthy, for now, or so it seems.
April’s employment report, released Friday, arrived with the usual anxiety and predictions that cuts made by the entity known as the Department of Government Efficiency would hurt job creation, and President Donald Trump’s tariffs would start to show up in the numbers as small businesses and other manufacturers slow their hiring due to the rising cost of doing business. It didn’t happen.
Once again, DOGE cuts and tariffs did not appear to have any meaningful impact on employment. The economy added 177,000 jobs in April, the Labor Department said Friday, more than the 133,000 jobs that had been forecast by economists. The unemployment rate also held steady at 4.2%. That robust result gives the Federal Reserve breathing room to leave interest rates unchanged for now.
Healthcare can help boost the labor market in the short term, but that will be far more difficult in the long term.
Jobs in healthcare were a standout. Healthcare added 51,000 jobs in April, around the same as the average monthly gain of 52,000 over the previous 12 months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said, which is about the same as the average monthly gain of 52,000 over the prior 12 months. Last month, there was particularly strong job growth in hospitals (22,000 new jobs) and ambulatory healthcare services (21,000 new jobs).
We can now, perhaps, all shift our anxieties to next month and, while we’re at it, to the ongoing whipsawing of S&P 500 SPX, Nasdaq COMP and Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA. “The April jobs report shows that the labor market was on solid footing as trade war tensions became more disruptive early last month,” Jeff Schulze, head of economic and market strategy at ClearBridge Investments, said in a note.
“The data for this release was collected during the week following Liberation Day, meaning it would be too soon to expect substantial fallout to emerge just as higher tariffs were being implemented,” he added, referring to the sweeping tariffs Trump announced on April 2. “As a result, investors are likely to look through this positive print, viewing it as a ‘calm before the storm.’”
It may not come as a surprise that, with a median salary of $126,000, the No. 1 “best job in America” is in healthcare. The U.S. News & World Report ranks nurse practitioner as the best job for 2025. The best-paid 25% in this profession make more than $140,600, while the lowest-paid 25% make almost $107,000. The second-place job was IT manager and the third was physician assistant, another healthcare job.
So what’s going on? On closer inspection, the job gains were concentrated in a few sectors, including healthcare, transportation and warehousing, and leisure and hospitality. “We expect that transportation and warehousing jobs are at risk as the tariff effects kick in,” said Mike Fratantoni, chief economist at Mortgage Bankers Association. That leaves healthcare as the great white hope.
Healthcare, in particular, is regarded as “recession proof” — as much as any sector can lay claim to such a lofty title. As the April jobs report shows, healthcare jobs are still growing at almost double the rate of jobs overall. This demand is due in part to advances in technology and to a more effective healthcare system. But it’s also due in a large part to an aging population in need of care.
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That adds up to a lot of U.S. jobs growth centered around one industry. “Healthcare employment has grown more than twice as fast as the labor force since 1980, overtaking retail trade to become the largest industry by employment in 2009,” according to a report published last month from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “Earnings for healthcare workers have risen nearly twice as fast as those in other industries.”
More than half of industries added jobs in April, with the strongest gains coming from healthcare, said Cory Stahle, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab with a focus on the U.S. labor market. Just three industries, he said, have accounted for between 70% and 80% of jobs growth over the last 12 months: healthcare and social assistance, the government and leisure and hospitality.
Healthcare is regarded as ‘recession proof,’ as much as any sector can lay claim to such a lofty title.
Healthcare has been getting back on its feet. The industry started 2020 with 16.5 million jobs and ended up shedding 450,000 jobs by the end of that year, he told MarketWatch. There was significant attrition and burnout during the pandemic. With a return to normalcy in the U.S. economy, healthcare added 33,000 jobs over the course of 2021 and a massive 571,000 in healthcare.
Stahle also notes a labor market in which companies are not letting go of workers but are slow to hire. One industry can help boost the labor market and allay people’s fears of a broader downturn in the short term, but that will be far more difficult in the long term. “You need to have a variety of jobs,” Stahle said. “It’s really hard to imagine a world in which nurse and doctor jobs hold up the entire U.S. economy.”
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This post was originally published on Market Watch
