(TND) — American employers added 353,000 jobs last month, beating forecasts as the labor market remains strong heading into the new year.
The Labor Department on Friday also said the previous month’s jobs figures were revised up from 216,000 to 333,000.
“OMG,” labor economist Aaron Sojourner wrote on social media after the monthly jobs update was released.
He said the forecast called for 185,000 new jobs.
The economy has added nearly 3 million jobs over the last 12 months, he said. That's faster job growth than any year ending from 2016 through and including 2020, though down from recent years.
January’s figure also exceeded the 2023 average of 255,000 new jobs a month.
There were job gains in professional and business services, health care, retail, and social assistance, the Labor Department said. But the agency also noted that retail has seen little net growth since early last year.
Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi mentioned some measurement problems with the report in his post on X but also said, “... abstracting from all the statistical noise, the signal is the economy is VERY strong.”
The unemployment rate remained at 3.7% for the third straight month.
That makes it 24 consecutive months with an unemployment rate below 4%, which Sojourner said is the longest streak since 1979.
This report comes on the heels of another monthly report that showed the layoff rate stayed at just 1% in December, which was the most recent period covered by that report.
Sojourner previously told The National Desk that we’re essentially seeing record job security in the data.
“It's higher job security than any time in the 20 years we have records before the pandemic,” he said.
Friday’s report showed average hourly earnings increased 4.5% from a year ago and now sit at $34.55.
A widely cited inflation measure, the Consumer Price Index, last came in at 3.4%.
The Federal Reserve has signaled interest rate cuts are on the horizon as inflation continues to cool, but the Fed policymakers kept rates unchanged when they met this week.
"Job creation heated up in January, perhaps causing some Federal Reserve officials to break out in a sweat,” Bankrate Senior Economic Analyst Mark Hamrick said in an email Friday. “This is as they look to gain greater confidence that inflation is coming down at a sustained pace."
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