Official economic data is finally catching up to the fact that Americans have been feeling lousy about the job market for months.
The U.S. economy added just 73,000 nonfarm jobs in July, according to the latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s below market expectations and the roughly 80,000 benchmark for a healthy economy to support the growing population, says Laura Ullrich, Indeed’s director of economic research for North America.
A lot of economists are also paying attention to the latest report, which helps show a monthly picture of where jobs are growing and shrinking, because it downwardly revised its May and June numbers to show the economy added just 33,000 jobs over the two-month period, compared to earlier estimates of 291,000 jobs.
Following the release of Friday’s jobs report, President Donald Trump fired BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer, suggesting without evidence that the weaker-than-expected report had been “rigged” by federal workers bent on sabotaging the president.
Revisions are a normal part of the data collection process, and estimates move up or down to become more precise with additional payroll data up to several months after a report releases, Ullrich tells CNBC Make It.
But “these revisions took the prior two jobs report [in May and June] from a range where they looked like pretty healthy job reports to where they looked quite weak,” Ullrich says.
The latest numbers confirm the U.S. economy is slowing sharply, experts say. Here’s what else job seekers should know about the state of the labor market:
Health-care jobs are propping up job growth
At the beginning of the year, the labor market was primarily held up by jobs across three sectors: health care and social assistance, leisure and hospitality, and government hiring.
Leisure and hospitality job creation is down, driven in part by business pullback amid economic uncertainty, while government hiring is down following the Trump administration’s work to slash the size of the federal government.
Meanwhile, health care and social assistance have accounted for 48.8% of total employment growth over the last year, despite making up just 14.6% of the economy, Ullrich says.
New jobs span nurses, nurses assistants, patient care techs, home health aides and other roles. “Hospitals employ just about everybody,” Ullrich says.
Hospitals added 196,000 jobs over the last year, which is 3.5% growth and “pretty strong,” Ullrich says. Home health care services grew by 56,900 jobs, or 3.2%, over the last year.
A majority, 78.6%, of employees in this subsector are women, meaning 35% of all employment growth in the U.S. over the past year has been among women in health care and social assistance, Ullrich says.
Experts have long predicted the strength around health-care jobs to take care of an aging Baby Boomer population.
“Growth in that sector has remained robust,” Ullrich says.
Hiring in multiple high-growth sectors is sluggish
Other typically high-growth and high-paying sectors are shedding jobs, including professional and business services, manufacturing and government, which all lost more than 10,000 jobs each over the last month.
Some experts have dubbed the current environment a “white collar recession” among office workers. “Business and professional services added a ton of jobs in the post-pandemic period, but over the past year or so, it’s been relatively soft,” Ullrich says.
As for manufacturing, it’s hard to say what combination of factors is keeping jobs down, whether it’s new global tariffs, changing consumer habits, or overall economic uncertainty, among other things, Ullrich says.
Ullrich says the latest jobs numbers are just one more data point that add to a broader challenging economic picture, which could impact business plans and consumer spending.
“It’s been clear through multiple sources of data, including this jobs report, that the economy is slowing down a bit, and so that can certainly impact sentiment,” she says.
Another troubling sign: The number of people who’ve been unemployed for 27-plus weeks increased by 179,000 people to 1.8 million in July, according to BLS data. Long-term unemployed people make up roughly 1 in 4 people looking for a job right now.
Job postings are down on Indeed, Ullrich says, and economists have seen a disequilibrium in terms of what skills people have and what sectors are hiring.
Currently, “if you are somebody that’s trying to find a job in manufacturing or business and professional services, it’s likely a pretty tough job market right now,” Ullrich says. “If you’re graduating with a nursing degree, I feel pretty confident that there’s someone out there looking to hire you.”
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