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May was a good month for the US labor market. So it was April, and so it was March. The economy is once again adding tens of thousands of new jobs in various industries—don’t call it a boom.
Last year, the US labor market was caught in what my colleague Rogé Karma described as The Great Freeze. Unemployment was low—people who wanted jobs in large numbers had them—but they got them new work was hard: The rate of employment was as slow as it had been since the start of the pandemic. We are now in something like a spring thaw. Employers have added, on average, 114,000 jobs month this year. Compared to 2025, the average time was fair 10,000 per monththe number represents the known inversion. But this is moderate growth, not massive expansion, and employment is only one measure of many in determining the health of the economy. Think of this change as a careful transition into a new phase.
The sharp decline in 2025 employment had a few possible explanations. When President Trump returned to office in January, his administration immediately tightened immigration enforcement, deporting them hundreds of thousands of people during the calendar year. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that net migration—that is, arrivals minus departures—was. 410,000 last year, about a fifth of what was expected to be before Trump’s return, although the Brookings Institution estimates that the true number may be much lower. Fewer new people in the country means fewer people looking for work. That may explain why, despite the fact that few new jobs were being created, unemployment he stayed the lowest amount last year: 4.3 percent. The sudden arrival and eventual repeal of tough new tax policies may also have played a role in last year’s sluggish hiring numbers. Broadly speaking, employers appeared to be “monitor the situation”: monitoring the decisions of the unpredictable president, and waiting for the right moment to release new employees.
The labor market now seems to be ignoring some of the paralysis of the decision. Incredibly, unemployment has been below 5 percent for nearly five years. And while the job market is not as strong as it was during the post-COVID economic climate of 2021 through early 2023, the latest hiring numbers have been unequivocal: Employers are up. 172,000 new jobs the month of May in various sectors, including entertainment and hospitality, local government, construction, manufacturing and health services. Until recently, most of the few jobs added each month were in the health care industry. “There was no game in town more than health care in 2025,” Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG US, told me. Health care continues to add new jobs at a rapid pace, thanks in part to the constant demand of an aging population, but it is not the only important player in today’s job market.
Analysts have theories as to why this might happen, but understanding why the labor market behaves the way it does inevitably involves some guesswork, in part because the Bureau of Labor Statistics regularly publishes revisions to older data. Experts are reluctant to talk about job growth prospects in full. One explanation for the spate of recent hires, economic reporter and analyst Matthew C. Klein told me, is that the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration has “diminished.” Expulsion is clear they still happen at high levels, but the fact that the country’s growth rate has slightly increased may be enough to overcome the negative pressure on new employers. (The government’s monthly employment surveys do not distinguish between temporary and non-immigrant workers, making it difficult to know the exact role that immigrant workers may have played in recent growth.)
Another possibility is that businesses are starting to feel the effects of the tax cuts passed in last year’s Good Bill Act, and therefore have more money to spend on employees. Enthusiasm around AI—which has continued to evolve at an astonishing pace, shrug concerns of some critics of the bubble-may also have something to do with them. And last year’s price has dropped significantly, in part due to the Supreme Court’s February ruling. to dominate contrary to the president’s view. Businesses now have “more certainty” about the future, Guy Berger, senior fellow at the Burning Glass Institute, told me.
Will career growth continue at this clip? With Trump signaling that the war in Iran is almost over, energy prices have been falling, which may give some employers the confidence (and money) to keep hiring. “I don’t see anything on the horizon that would make me worry about the labor market,” Berger told me. “Especially if the price of gas is under the table, there is none alive dangerous.”
Americans are largely unhappy with the president’s handling of the economy, and last month’s employment data gave him a major political victory. “IT’S RAINING WORK,” Trump has been published earlier this month. This is surprising, given his history of describing BLS data as “rigged” and “spoofed” — clearly, he’s happy to trust federal data when it works in his favor. Ultimately, though, these numbers are more like a course correction, a return to some semblance of normalcy after the hangover of the post-Covid rental boom. They are not in themselves evidence that the United States is in a “golden age,” as Trump likes to say.
Although the stock market continues to tumble through record highs, research suggests that consumer sentiment—how confident people are about their own finances and about the economy—is hell. Inflation is rising faster than it has in years, and hourly wages are growing slowly. Given the risk that inflation may stick, the Fed’s policy-making arm signaled yesterday that interest rates may rise in the coming days. (Prices will remain unchanged for now.) That employers are temporarily starting to hire again is an important sign—but only part of the story.
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Today’s news
- In a statement read by state media, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei said that Iran would not accept “excessive demands” from the United States in future direct talks.
- The Supreme Court ruled reduce power of the federal government to restrict gun rights for drug users.
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Vice President Vance he rebuked Israel’s critics of the Iran deal, saying that President Trump is Israel’s only strong ally in the world.
Dispatches
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Evening Read
The Cult of Delayed Gratification is a Lie
By Ian Bogost
Eating a pint of ice cream instead of improving a difficult relationship with your spouse is easy. So is scrolling through social media instead of completing a cardio workout at the gym. Simple and accessible things are seen as distractions that take you away from a better life, rather than tools to help you achieve a more meaningful life. Seeking satisfaction, we’re told, feels good in the moment but worse in the long run.
But gratification is good—even though it gets a bad rap… Indulgences distract us from our goals—or even become sources of harm or destruction—when they are selfish pursuits undertaken only to please ourselves. But satisfaction can be directed toward the world—the emotional magic of everyday life. The world is full of common things that you can still communicate with. Doing so is easy, and free.
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Isabel Fattal contributed to this journal.
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