Average hourly earnings growth for workers registered 3.5 percent on an annual basis, a marked slowdown from the peak a few years ago. And pay raises are not keeping up with prices, a major reason consumer sentiment remains so low. Inflation is now hovering around 4 percent after dropping near 2 percent in 2024.

In positive news, employment in professional and business services, which fell overall from 2024 to 2025, has trended up since the start of 2026, and the sector added 36,000 jobs in June. Jobs in social assistance and health care have continued their steady gains. Despite a bump in activity from the World Cup, leisure and hospitality employment declined by 61,000 in June. Labor economists have mentioned, though, that this summer’s numbers may be a noisy reflection of seasonal adjustments in the data.

This was the fourth consecutive monthly increase in jobs, an impressive turnaround from the jobs slowdown that occurred throughout 2025. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that U.S. employers added only 181,000 jobs last year, far fewer than the 1.5 million jobs that were added in 2024.

Jason Draho, an economist and the head of asset allocation for the Americas at UBS, called the report “not bad.”

He noted that the addition of 57,000 jobs “is right around what most economists assume is the trend level of job growth.”

Gregory Daco, the chief economist at EY, a consulting firm, said he anticipates job growth will stabilize at approximately 70,000 per month for the rest of the year, and the unemployment rate may edge up, but only slightly.

The unemployment rate has been at or below 4.5 percent since October 2021, the longest streak of low unemployment since the long expansion in the late 1960s. Still, an unusually low number of people are quitting their jobs; surveys show workers are staying put because they lack confidence in finding better opportunities.