The job market is tipping in favor of blue-collar and service workers over white-collar fields.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ new jobs report showed August was a promising time to be a job seeker. The US added 162,000 jobs, about three times the expected gain of 55,000. Growth was widely distributed across sectors, and only two major industries lost jobs, both of which were white-collar fields.
Leisure and hospitality accounted for about 40% of job growth after the sector lost jobs in June and July. The industry has pretty much been flipping between gains and losses in 2026, and it typically has high churn. Employment in government bounced back after July’s drop, driven by local government education.
“There’s some seasonality happening in those two sectors as well, so don’t want to read too much into that, I would say, but still good to see it on the upside,” said Laura Ullrich, director of economic research in North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab.
Construction employment has been on the rise. ZipRecruiter economist Nicole Bachaud said this demand could be due to both a need for more residential housing and the data center boom.
“There’s a big push in demand for jobs from everything from construction to pipe welders to electricians,” she said. “People who are building and powering these facilities are in strong demand across the country.”
Healthcare and social assistance have been a driver of the job market and will likely continue to be a job-growth engine, as the US will need more workers to care for the aging population and replace healthcare retirees. The two sectors together added 28,400 jobs in August, or about 18% of the overall gain.
It’s rare to see job growth in information and financial activities these days. The information sector, which includes large parts of the tech and media industries, climbed to about 3.1 million total employees in late 2022 and has since tumbled. Employment in this sector was about 12% below that peak this past August.
“A lot of that has to do with the ways that AI is showing up in the market,” Bachaud said. “We’re seeing some response from, specifically in the information sector, in terms of slowing down employment.”
Not all white-collar sectors are losing jobs. Employment in professional and business services was up 0.7% from a year ago. Bachaud said that this sector employs a lot of tech workers, like the information sector, and has “increased demand for jobs as AI is really shifting around what types of jobs are going to be most in demand and is really more than anything changing the tasks within jobs.”
Ullrich said that, despite the positive gains and robust overall growth, this doesn’t offer much solace to job seekers, since the hiring rate is comparable to the early 2010s, and there’s not a lot of churn as people hold tight to their jobs and layoffs remain low.
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