The Job Market Is Thawing

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May was a good month for the American labor market. So was April, and so was March. The economy is once again adding tens of thousands of new jobs across a range of industries—just don’t call it a boom.

Last year, America’s job market was trapped in what my colleague Rogé Karma described as the Big Freeze. Unemployment was low—people who wanted jobs largely had them—but finding new work was difficult: The hiring rate was as slow as it had been since the start of the pandemic. Now we’re in something like a spring thaw. Employers have added, on average, 114,000 jobs a month this year. Compared with 2025, when the average was just 10,000 a month, the number represents a notable reversal. But this is moderate growth, not a radical expansion, and hiring is just one metric of many for determining the health of the economy. Think of these changes as a cautious transition into a new phase.

The great hiring slowdown of 2025 had a few possible explanations. When President Trump returned to office in January, his government immediately stepped up immigration enforcement, deporting hundreds of thousands of people over the course of the calendar year. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that net migration—that is, arrivals minus departures—was 410,000 last year, about one-fifth of what it was projected to be before Trump’s return, although the Brookings Institution estimates that the true number could be much lower. Fewer new people in the country means fewer people looking for work. That could explain why, despite the fact that fewer new jobs were being created, unemployment stayed relatively low last year: 4.3 percent. The sudden arrival and eventual retraction of aggressive new tariff policies may have also played a role in last year’s sluggish hiring numbers. Broadly, employers seemed to be “monitoring the situation”: tracking the decisions of an unpredictable president, and waiting for the right time to shell out for new workers.

The labor market now seems to have shrugged off some of that decision paralysis. Remarkably, unemployment has been under 5 percent for about five years. And though the labor market isn’t quite as strong as it was during the post-COVID economic snapback of 2021 through early 2023, the latest hiring numbers have been unequivocal: Employers added 172,000 new jobs in May across a variety of sectors, including leisure and hospitality, local government, construction, manufacturing, and health care. Until recently, a large proportion of the few jobs being added each month were in the health care industry. “There was no game in town other than health care in 2025,” Diane Swonk, the chief economist at KPMG US, told me. Health care continues to add new jobs at a steady rate, thanks in part to an aging population’s consistent need for it, but it’s not the only important player in today’s job market.

Analysts have theories as to why this might be happening, but understanding why the labor market behaves the way it does inevitably involves some guesswork, in part because the Bureau of Labor Statistics is constantly publishing revisions to old data. Experts hesitate to talk about job-growth expectations in absolutes. One explanation for the spate of recent hires, the economics journalist and analyst Matthew C. Klein told me, is that the force of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown on the hirers has “bottomed out.” Deportations are clearly still happening at high levels, but the fact that the country’s growth rate has picked up a little could be enough to overcome some of that negative pressure on new hires. (The government’s monthly employment surveys don’t distinguish between hires with and without temporary visas, making it difficult to know the exact role that immigrant workers may have played in the recent growth.)

Another possibility is that businesses are starting to feel the effects of the tax breaks enacted in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and therefore have more money to spend on personnel. Enthusiasm around AI—which has continued to evolve at an astonishing pace, shrugging off some critics’ concerns of a bubble—could also have something to do with it. And last year’s tariff whiplash has largely subsided, in part thanks to the Supreme Court’s February ruling against the president’s approach. Businesses now have “a lot more certainty” about what the future holds, Guy Berger, a senior fellow at the Burning Glass Institute, told me.

Will job growth continue at this clip? With Trump signaling that the war in Iran is about to end, energy prices have been falling, which could give some employers the confidence (and the cash) to keep hiring. “I don’t see anything on the horizon that would make me worried about the job market,” Berger told me. “Especially if gas prices are off the table, there’s no active risk.”

Americans are largely unhappy with the president’s stewardship of the economy, and last month’s employment data handed him a much-needed political win. “IT’S RAINING JOBS,” Trump posted earlier this month. This is ironic, given his history of describing BLS data as “faked” and “rigged”—clearly, he’s happy to trust the federal data when they work in his favor. Ultimately, though, these numbers are more like a course correction, a return to some semblance of normalcy after the hangover of a post-COVID hiring spree. They are not in and of themselves evidence that the United States is in a “golden age,” as Trump likes to say.

Although the stock market continues to smash through record highs, research suggests that consumer sentiment—how confident people feel about their own finances and about the economy—is abysmal. Inflation is surging faster than it has in years, and hourly wages are growing relatively slowly. Conscious of the risk that inflation might stick, the Fed’s policy-setting arm signaled yesterday that interest rates could rise in the future. (Rates will remain unchanged for now.) That employers are tentatively starting to hire again is an important signal—but it’s only one part of the story.

Related:

The worst-case future for white-collar workers
The job market is frozen. (From 2025)

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Evening Read

Illustration of a small girl figurine surrounded by marshmallows. — Illustration by Joanne Joo

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 partner is easy. So is scrolling social media instead of completing a cardio workout at the gym. Simple and accessible delights seem like lures that drag you away from a better life, rather than tools to help you achieve a more meaningful one. Seeking gratification, we have been 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 gratification can be pointed toward the world—the sensory enchantment of everyday life. The world is full of ordinary stuff with which you might yet commune. Doing so is easy, and free.

Read the full article.