March's jobs report came in well above expectations, with the U.S. economy adding 178,000 jobs. Economists had forecast a gain of just 59,000. The unemployment rate edged down to 4.3%, though that decline was driven largely by a drop in the number of Americans actively looking for work. The three-month average stands at about 68,000 jobs, reflecting February's revised loss of 133,000.
Jobs gains and losses, by sector:
Health care led all sectors, adding 76,000 jobs. A significant portion of that gain, 35,000 positions, came from workers returning after a strike at Kaiser Permanente in February.
Construction added 26,000 jobs and transportation and warehousing grew by 21,000.
The federal government shed another 18,000 jobs in March. Since reaching a peak in October 2024, federal employment is down 355,000 positions, a decline of 11.8%.
Financial activities lost 15,000 jobs.
Unemployment edged down:
The unemployment rate dropped from 4.4% in February to 4.3% in March, though the decline reflected a reduction of 396,000 people in the labor force rather than more people finding work.
The labor force participation rate fell to 61.9%, its lowest since November 2021.
Long-term unemployed people, those out of work for 27 weeks or more, held roughly steady at 1.8 million, accounting for 25.4% of all unemployed people.
Wage growth slowing; workweek shortened:
Average hourly earnings for private sector workers rose 9 cents, or 0.2%, to $37.38 in March. Year-over-year earnings growth was 3.5%, the slowest rate since May 2021, and just enough to keep pace with inflation.
The average workweek fell 0.1 hour to 34.2 hours.
Prior months were revised:
January's jobs report was revised up by 34,000, from +126,000 to +160,000. February's was revised down by 41,000, from -92,000 to -133,000. Combined, January and February are 7,000 lower than previously reported.
Read more via Bureau of Labor Statistics, The New York Times, CNBC
NOTE: The ADP Employment Report and the Bureau of Labor Statistics Jobs Report utilize different data, and therefore provide differing reports. ADP's report includes only private sector data.
According to ADP's latest National Employment Report, the U.S. private sector added 62,000 jobs in March. Hiring and pay gains both held steady, with the smallest employers driving job growth for the second month in a row.
Sector gains and losses:
Education and health services added 58,000 jobs, while construction added 30,000 and natural resources and mining added 11,000.
Manufacturing lost 11,000 jobs. Trade, transportation, and utilities declined by 58,000.
Job gains and losses by region and business size:
The South drove March gains, adding 101,000 jobs. The West added 16,000. The Northeast lost 29,000 jobs and the Midwest lost 26,000.
Small establishments with 1-19 employees added 112,000 jobs. Medium-sized businesses (50-499 employees) lost 20,000, and large establishments (500 or more employees) lost 4,000.
Pay gains held steady for job-stayers; job-changers saw a boost:
For job-stayers, pay growth held at 4.5% year-over-year for the third consecutive month.
Pay growth for job-changers accelerated to 6.6%.
Overall hiring is steady, but job growth continues to favor certain industries, including health care. In March, this solid performance was accompanied by a boost in pay gains for job-changers."
Read more via ADP
The latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary (JOLTS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the U.S. labor market increasingly stuck in neutral, with hiring falling to its lowest rate since the early days of the pandemic.
Job openings held steady:
Job openings came in at 6.9 million in February, down slightly from a revised 7.2 million in January. The job openings rate held at 4.2%.
Openings declined in accommodation and food services (-211,000) and mining and logging (-12,000).
Hiring fell to a five-year low:
Total hires dropped to 4.8 million in February, down 498,000 from January and down 387,000 over the year.
The hires rate fell to 3.1%, matching the low last seen in April 2020 during the early weeks of the pandemic shutdown. The drop from 3.4% to 3.1% in a single month was the largest one-month decline since 2016, outside of the pandemic.
Hires declined in accommodation and food services (-178,000) and construction (-88,000).
Workers are staying put:
Total separations were little changed at 5.0 million, a rate of 3.1%.
The quits rate fell to 1.9% in February, the eighth consecutive month at or below 2.0%. Quits declined in accommodation and food services (-119,000), wholesale trade (-35,000), and federal government (-6,000).
Layoffs and discharges held steady at 1.7 million, a rate of 1.1%.
The low-hire, low-fire dynamic that has defined this market for the better part of a year was firmly intact through February. The engine was running; it was just stuck in neutral."
Read more via Bureau of Labor Statistics, Indeed Hiring Lab, Fortune
U.S. employers announced 60,620 job cuts in March, up from 48,307 in February, according to the latest Challenger, Gray & Christmas report. For the first time, AI was the single leading cited reason for cuts in a given month, accounting for 25% of March layoffs.
Technology led all sectors in Q1 with 52,050 cuts, up 40% from the same period last year, as a number of large employers shed workers while shifting budgets toward AI.
Transportation cuts hit a record Q1 high of 32,241, up 703% from the same period in 2025, with airlines and shipping companies expected to face further pressure from the Iran conflict.
Healthcare job cuts also hit a record Q1 high at 23,520, surpassing the previous record set in 2023.
Despite the monthly increase, the Q1 total of 217,362 cuts is down 56% from Q1 2025, which was heavily inflated by federal government layoffs.
AI has now been cited in nearly 100,000 job cut announcements since Challenger began tracking the reason in 2023, though it still accounts for only about 13% of all 2026 cuts year to date.
Companies are shifting budgets toward AI investments at the expense of jobs."
Read more via Challenger, Gray & Christmas
"AI washing," the practice of attributing job cuts to AI when the real causes are slower sales, overhiring, or cost-cutting, is becoming widespread, according to economists and researchers. U.S. employers laid off more than 1.2 million workers in 2025, but Forrester estimates fewer than 100,000 of those losses were primarily driven by AI productivity gains.
Oracle is cutting thousands of employees as part of an ongoing effort to free up cash flow for the company's AI spending.
Meta recently laid off around 700 employees, primarily in its Reality Labs virtual reality division, along with some cuts in recruiting, sales and Facebook.
"It's a wonderful way of looking like a genius when job cuts are something you might have to do for other operational reasons," said one tech founder who uses AI agents in his own company but is skeptical of others' claims.
Citing AI during layoffs can boost stock prices by signaling efficiency and innovation, and gives managers a ready-made explanation that deflects from more mundane business problems.
Economists say it's still "pretty hard to see evidence of AI impacting the labor market at the macro level," according to Glassdoor's chief economist. Regulatory hurdles, cybersecurity requirements and tool immaturity mean most AI systems aren't ready to replace workers at scale.
Cutting staff ahead of actual AI productivity gains can backfire: Gartner predicts half of companies that replace customer service workers with bots will rehire people within a year, partly because enterprise AI tools can be more expensive than the humans they replaced.
Forrester projects 6.1% of U.S. jobs could eventually be lost to AI by 2030, which it describes as "bad but not an apocalypse."
Read more via The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, The New York Times
U.S. film and TV employment has fallen 30% from its late-2022 peak, as studios make fewer productions and increasingly shoot overseas to take advantage of generous foreign tax incentives. Behind-the-scenes workers represented by the IATSE union worked 36% fewer hours in 2025 than in 2022, with many losing health insurance eligibility as a result.
The number of newly started U.S. productions with budgets over $40 million dropped from 251 in 2021 to 159 in 2025, while the U.K., Canada and Australia have all grown their share of big-budget work, aided by tax rebates that can cover nearly half of local production costs.
The streaming boom that drove "peak TV" in the early 2020s has given way to a Wall Street-driven push for profitability, meaning less content spending across the board.
The industry faces major structural headwinds. Viewers are spending more time on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram content made with nonunion labor, and sports rights costs are crowding out entertainment budgets.
AI adds further uncertainty: it could eliminate more production jobs, or it could spark a new boom by making content cheaper to produce.
Read more via The Wall Street Journal
The Labor Department published a proposed rule that would significantly increase the minimum pay employers must offer foreign workers on H-1B and related high-skilled visa programs, the latest in a series of moves aimed at discouraging companies from using foreign labor instead of American workers.
Under the proposal, entry-level wage minimums would jump from the 17th to the 34th wage percentile, with similar upward shifts across all four experience tiers. The DOL estimates the changes would raise the average certified wage by roughly $14,000 per year per worker.
The rule would make it meaningfully more expensive to sponsor entry-level or early-career foreign workers, effectively pushing the program toward higher-wage, more experienced hires.
The proposal revives a nearly identical rule from Trump's first term that was challenged in court and later dropped by the Biden administration.
Employers are not immediately affected: the new wage floors would apply only to new applications and those pending on the rule's effective date, leaving existing approved certifications untouched.
Immigration attorneys are advising employers to review their current H-1B workforce now, consider proactively filing extensions, and assess which positions are at wage levels most likely to be affected.
Read more via The Wall Street Journal, SHRM
USCIS announced Tuesday that it received enough registrations to hit the 85,000-visa annual cap for FY2027, completing the first H-1B lottery conducted under new Trump administration rules that weight selection in favor of higher-paid, more senior workers. Employers with selected candidates can begin filing petitions April 1.
The lottery comes as the administration simultaneously proposed raising minimum wage requirements for H-1B workers by 21% to 33%, and maintains a $100,000 fee for workers hired from outside the U.S. or requiring consular processing.
Read more via Bloomberg Law, USCIS
President Trump signed an executive order directing all federal departments and agencies to insert a clause in their contracts requiring vendors to certify they will not engage in "racially discriminatory DEI activities." Agencies have until April 25 to add the clause to contracts, and until July 24 to review compliance.
The executive order makes note of the administration's "significant progress" toward curbing DEI-related programs. However, the order notes that “[d]espite this progress, some entities continue to engage in DEI activities and often attempt to conceal their efforts to do so.”
Contractors who violate the clause risk contract cancellation, and the attorney general has been directed to consider False Claims Act charges against non-compliant vendors.
The order also directs the EEOC and other agency leaders to identify economic sectors at particular risk of DEI-related discrimination and provide further compliance guidance.
The order is the latest in a series of DEI-related actions from the Trump administration, which has largely survived legal challenges. In February, a federal appeals court vacated an injunction that had temporarily blocked earlier DEI executive orders.
Separately, EEOC chair Andrea Lucas recently warned the entire Fortune 500 against DEI-based discrimination, signaling the agency intends to actively pursue private sector DEI programs as a basis for discrimination claims.
A recent Littler Mendelson survey found DEI was the single top workplace policy concern among employers after Trump's first year, cited at more than double the rate of AI.
Read more via HR Dive, The White House
A Labor Department proposal released Monday would make it easier for retirement plan managers to offer workers access to alternative assets including cryptocurrencies and private equity funds, which have historically been available only to wealthy individuals and large institutional investors. The rule would cover roughly 721,000 retirement plans holding more than $8.8 trillion in assets for about 118 million workers.
Under current rules, retirement plan fiduciaries face legal uncertainty about offering complex or higher-risk investments, which has made most of them cautious. The proposed rule would grant safe harbor protections to fiduciaries who follow a thorough, documented process when considering alternative assets.
Supporters argue private market investments can improve long-term returns and diversification. Critics, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, say the assets carry higher fees, limited liquidity, and greater risk for everyday retirement savers.
The proposal comes at a complicated moment for alternative assets: some private credit funds have recently moved to restrict investor redemptions, a sign of stress in that market.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described it as "an initial step" aimed at being "mindful of the importance of protecting retirement assets." The DOL will open a 60-day public comment period before deciding whether to finalize the rule.
Read more via The Washington Post, Reuters
Israel: About half of Israeli tech companies report that more than a quarter of their workforce is absent due to reserve duty, school closures, and security restrictions, as the conflict with Iran enters its second month, according to a survey of 637 tech executives by the Israel Innovation Authority. 42% of firms report delays in meeting development goals, 75% say international flight restrictions are disrupting business operations, and 71% say the war has affected capital raising or investment processes. Perhaps most strikingly, 31% of surveyed tech companies are considering relocating business activity abroad, with a quarter of those fearing full closure if the conflict continues for another month. (Times of Israel)
Japan: More than 80% of Japanese respondents support allowing more foreign workers into the country to support economic growth, according to a new Yomiuri Shimbun survey, with the strongest preference for workers with specialized skills. However, support drops sharply when the question shifts to permanent immigration: 57% oppose allowing foreigners to settle in Japan permanently, with younger respondents aged 18 to 39 the most opposed at 63%. (Japan News)
Saudi Arabia: Saudi Arabia's unemployment rate among nationals fell to 7.2% in the fourth quarter of 2025, down from 7.5% the prior quarter, according to the country's General Authority for Statistics. Female unemployment among Saudi nationals declined to 10.3%, down 1.6 percentage points year over year, while the female employment rate has risen 4.2 percentage points over the past five years to 31%. (Saudi Gazette)
