April job gains suggest labor market is stabilizing, for now

Folks already wincing this morning in anticipation of today’s jobs report were in for a surprise.

The latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics once again beat expectations and even points to the labor market stabilizing, labor economists told HR Brew, despite concerns over how the US-Israeli war with Iran might hurt the economy. That said, as an energy crisis looms, concerns about a hiring slowdown linger.

Diving into the data. Employers added 115,000 jobs in April, beating economists’ expectations of 55,000, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Job gains for March were revised up to 185,000, while total losses in February were lowered even further to 156,000. The unemployment rate was unchanged, from 4.3%.

Excluding February, which saw job losses partly due to winter storms and healthcare strikes, the labor market has added at least 115,000 jobs per month since January, suggesting a normalization of sorts for employers, Nicole Bachaud, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter, told HR Brew.

“There is more certainty in the market, at least as far as employers are concerned, than there has been over the past several months in the last year. And so that’s one of the reasons why we’re starting to see hiring kind of warming back up a little bit,” Bachaud said.

Healthcare, which contributed the bulk of job growth in 2025, added 37,000 jobs in April, the most of any industry. But other sectors also reported robust job gains, including transportation and warehousing, which reported 30,000 job gains in April primarily concentrated in couriers and messengers, and retail trade, which added 22,000 jobs.

“It’s encouraging to see a little bit more of that balance playing out as there are job opportunities kind of outside of a singular industry,” Bachaud said. “That’s something that I think is an interesting thing to continue watching and see how healthcare continues to play a role in terms of the makeup of overall job gains.”

However, Kory Kantenga, head of economics for the Americas at LinkedIn, noted that those two sectors—transportation and retail—are ones that don’t consistently see job growth.

“I cannot imagine that going forward in the labor market, we are going to be adding thousands and thousands of couriers and messengers,” he told HR Brew, adding: “Today’s top line number is solid, but I don’t think it’s going to endure.”

Moreover, Kantenga also noted the metrics he looks for in the jobs report suggest the labor market is stabilizing, not necessarily improving. Temporary help services, for example, reported just under 8,000 job gains in April, keeping pace with gains for the sector in prior months. Employers aren’t showing “a huge boost in appetite” for contingent work, he noted, but they’re also not shirking these services, which some do when they need to trim costs. Similarly, unemployment rose for some groups more vulnerable to job market slowdowns, including teenagers and Black workers, though not at the same rates seen at the end of the 2025, Kantenga noted.

“We just don’t see any momentum in the labor market when we look at the segments that are very acute, like contingent work. When we look at the demographics that are very vulnerable, there’s no signs that the labor market is turning around for these folks. It’s just continuing to hold up at best and in some cases, slow down,” he said. “So we’re just stuck in low gear for the labor market, and we have this risk of slowing down further later on in the year.”

What about gas prices? As the war with Iran has dragged on, concerns about oil prices have mounted. Gasoline prices have spiked 50% since late February, and experts have worried that the pain at the pump could affect the job market. That didn’t seem to be the case in April.

“It was interesting to see that transportation and also retail saw pretty strong gains compared to their last few months. In those two industries, it doesn’t seem that gas prices have really had any sort of negative effect yet on job growth,” Bachaud said.

However, circumstances could change in the coming months. The last oil tanker to go through the Strait of Hormuz before its closure just arrived in California this week, and while talks to reopen the Strait have resumed, it could be a long time before the oil crisis is resolved. Industries reliant on gasoline like transportation and warehousing could see a slowdown in hiring, as well as sectors dependent on discretionary spending, such as leisure and hospitality, should consumers tighten their belts to afford fuel, according to Bachaud.

Kantenga also noted that, according to LinkedIn data, 19 of 20 industries slowed down hiring between March and April, suggesting a “big macro effect” on the labor market from rising oil prices.

“That may foretell some slowdown in the months ahead, if we continue to go down this path where energy prices are rising, we are likely to see some slowdown labor market,” he said.