Employment Research Brief

Hiring eases after strong final stretch of 2024. Employers kicked off 2025 by creating 143,000 jobs in January, compared with an average of 166,000 per month last year. About 66,000 of the positions added in January, nearly half the overall net gain, originated from health services fields, while another 34,000 came from retail trade. Although the concentration of hiring momentum within only a handful of industries may signal some softening, overall the labor market has been performing well recently. More than 500,000 jobs were created in the last two months of 2024 — almost a third of the year’s total growth. Even when accounting for January’s smaller reading, the average number of positions added on net over those three months was 237,000 per period, which is above the 2014–2019 mean.