US employers likely added 60,000 jobs last month, subdued but a marked
improvement over 2025 hiring
[March 06, 2026] By
PAUL WISEMAN
WASHINGTON (AP) — The American job market is looking brighter this year
than it did in a gloomy 2025.
The Labor Department is expected to report Friday that U.S. companies,
nonprofits and government agencies added 60,000 jobs last month. That
would be down from an unexpectedly strong 130,000 in January. But it
would mark considerable improvement over the monthly average of just
15,000 new jobs in 2025, weakest hiring since the COVID-19 recession
year 2020.
The unemployment rate is forecast to have stayed at a low 4.3% last
month, according to a survey of forecasters by the data firm FactSet.
The Bank of America Institute said Wednesday that its data – drawn from
anonymized customer accounts – also showed solid hiring in February for
the second straight month – expanding 1.3% last month on top of a 0.8%
gain in January. “Job market growth is gaining traction,” David Tinsley,
a senior economist at the Bank of America Institute, told reporters
Wednesday. “February’s numbers show real forward momentum.”
Likewise, a private report on Wednesday by payroll processor ADP showed
that companies added 63,000 jobs in February, the most since last July.
The Labor Department report is likely to show that February hiring was
hampered by frigid winter weather and a four-week strike by nurses and
other front-line workers at Kaiser Permanente in California and Hawaii,
which probably shaved more than 30,000 jobs off last month’s payrolls.
Some economists also suspect that the solid January jobs figures were
overstated and are likely to be revised lower in Friday’s report.
The outlook for the job market – and the entire economy – is clouded by
the war with Iran.
Employers were reluctant to hire last year because of uncertainty over
President Donald Trump’s tariffs – and the unpredictable way he rolled
them out.
High interest rates, engineered by the Federal Reserve to combat a burst
of inflation following the COVID-19 pandemic, also weighed on the job
market in 2025.
The impact of Trump’s aggressive trade policies may recede in 2025. His
import taxes became smaller and less erratic after he reached a trade
truce last year with China and deals with leading U.S. trade partners
such as Japan and the European Union. A lot of businesses have also
learned how to offset the costs of the tariffs, often by passing them
along to customers via higher prices.
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 Businesses needed “a year to bake
some of those costs into their business model, and now it’s time to
get back to growth mode,’’ said Andy Decker, CEO of Atlanta-based
Goodwin Recruiting.
The Supreme Court has also struck down the biggest
and boldest of Trump’s tariffs – though he is planning to replace
them.
Still, hiring continues to lag far behind the hiring boom of
2021-2023 when the economy was bouncing back from pandemic lockdowns
and the United States was adding nearly 400,000 jobs a month. Many
economists describe today’s job market as “no-hire, no-fire’’:
Companies are reluctant to add workers but don’t want to let go of
the ones they have.
Luckily, achieving good-enough job growth is easier these days.
Until a year or two ago, employers needed to hire well over 100,000
people a month to keep the unemployment rate from rising.
But Baby Boomer retirements and President Donald Trump’s
deportations mean there are fewer people competing for work. So the
break-even point is much lower – anywhere from zero to 50,000 jobs a
month, said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at the tax and consulting
firm RSM. “Under the current conditions, 70,000 should be considered
solid,’’ he said.
Companies may be holding off on hiring as they buy, install and
figure out how best to use new technologies, including artificial
intelligence. AI, after all, potentially means they “can do more
with less’’ and will need fewer workers, especially for entry-level
positions, Brusuelas said.
They are thinking, he said, “we’ve invested an awful lot of money in
(capital expenditures), and we need to see how much we can produce
with our current labor force... The last thing you want to do is
hire a lot of young people and then let them go.’’
_____
AP Economics Writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this report.
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