US job growth beat expectations in January while unemployment crept down, official data showed Wednesday, defying immediate concerns about labor market fragility on the back of President Donald Trump’s economic policies.
But revisions to 2025 figures in the report also indicated that the world’s biggest economy added significantly fewer jobs than earlier estimated for all of last year, averaging 15,000 per month rather than 49,000.
For now, government data suggest the labor market is showing more underlying resilience than anticipated.
In January, the United States added 130,000 jobs, the Department of Labor said, significantly higher than the 55,000 predicted in surveys by Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
The jobless rate inched lower to 4.3 percent from 4.4 percent in December.
Industries such as health care, social assistance and construction saw job gains, while losses took place in sectors like the federal government and financial activities.
Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi warned this week that Trump’s economic policies have driven a “dramatic slowdown in job growth” overall.
A part of this is due to highly restrictive immigration policy — hitting labor supply — while labor demand has also been impacted as tariffs and government job cuts take a toll on industries.
