Key Takeaways

Employers hired more people than forecasters had expected in March, showing a job market more resilient than expected right before President Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" tariff announcement shook up the economy.

The U.S. economy added 228,000 jobs in March, up from a downwardly revised 117,000 in February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday. The job growth blew past the expectations of forecasters, who had expected 140,000 jobs, according to a survey of economists by Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal . It was the highest job creation since December and the most during the Trump administration. Despite job gains, the unemployment rate edged up to 4.2% from 4.1%, remaining within the range it's hovered since May 2024.

Friday's report showed a last glimpse of the job market before Trump's announcement of steep tariffs against U.S. trading partners shook up the financial world Wednesday, dramatically changing the outlook for hiring and the trajectory of the economy. The job market continued to stay resilient despite high borrowing costs for loans (the result of the Federal Reserve's battle against inflation) and uncertainty about trade policy .

“Today’s better-than-expected jobs report will help ease fears of an immediate softening in the U.S. labor market," Lindsay Rosner, head of multi-sector fixed income investing at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, wrote in a commentary. "However, this number has become a side dish with the market just focusing on the entrée: tariffs.”

The jobs report may be less useful than usual as a barometer of the economy's health because of the tariff announcement this week.

"In the last 48 hours, the cornerstones of global trade have shifted so dramatically due to Trump's tariff announcements that the employment figures were already outdated by the time they were freshly released," Jochen Stanzl, chief market analyst at CMC Markets wrote in a commentary. "At present, it is simply too early to say how the jobs market will develop in this new environment. Even a glance at the jobs market situation in March does little to help."

The mass layoffs of federal workers initiated by Elon Musk and his DOGE cost-cutting task force did not dent the March data, which showed only the loss of 4,000 federal jobs. A separate survey conducted by a private consulting group showed that more than 280,000 federal layoffs were announced in March and February . The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted people as employed if they received severance, possibly contributing to the lack of DOGE-related unemployment in the data.

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