The U.S. shed 92,000 jobs in February and previous months of job growth were not as strong as previously reported, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced Friday in a report that will raise alarms about the state of the economy.
The unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 4.4%, little changed from January’s report. Economists had expected the economy to add 50,000 jobs and the unemployment report to remain at 4.3%.
Friday's report revised down January's previously stellar payrolls figure from 130,000 to 126,000. The agency also cut December’s figure from 50,000 jobs added to a contraction of 17,000.
With those revisions, 2025 was the first year to record five months of labor market contractions since 2010, as the economy was recovering from the global financial crisis.
"Well, that was ugly," wrote Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at the financial publishign company Bankrate, wrote in a note after Friday's data release.
Hamrick noted that in addition to the job contraction and revisions, the labor force participation rate also fell.
"Downward revisions for the previous two months of December and January add further insult to injury, paring a total of 69,000 jobs," he wrote. "Labor force participation, gauging those working and looking for work fell to 62%, a worrying sign that some workers were discouraged amid the softening seen over the past year."
The U.S. economy at large has remained a mixed bag, in part due to a variety of headwinds that have included a government shutdown and a lack of clarity over the Trump administration’s tariff agenda.
On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the administration’s tariff plans were on the verge of changing again. Bessent said Trump was expected to raise global tariffs to 15% this week, up from the 10% he recently introduced after the Supreme Court struck down most of the previous tariffs.
"Recent labor market data had been pointing to resilience, but today’s sharply weaker reading raises the risk that a different picture could be in play," Seema Shah, chief global strategist at the investment company Principal Asset Management, wrote in a note after the data release. "Markets are being tugged in opposing directions, and this jobs report adds yet another layer of uncertainty to an already noisy backdrop."
Employment in the health care sector decreased in February, which the BLS said reflected a major strike. That strike, at Kaiser Permanente, temporarily took about 31,000 people off the job.
While only temporary, those job losses underscore how the health sector was the overwhelming driver of the U.S. job gains recorded last year.
The information technology sector, the federal government and transportation and warehousing also showed weakness, according to Friday’s data.
The BLS said a number of other industries showed “little change,” including the oil and gas sector, manufacturing, construction, retail and the financial industry.
The tepid change in manufacturing roles continues a trend seen for most of last year, despite the Trump administration’s push to revitalize the manufacturing industry and onshore production facilities.
Friday’s data could cause the Federal Reserve to focus more closely on the labor market. Already, the central bank is not expected to cut rates until the summer at the earliest, but Friday’s report sent U.S. government bond yields sharply lower. Stock futures hit their lows of the morning on the report.
An underwhelming report on economic growth in February — the Commerce Department showed that the annual rate of the output of goods and services (gross domestic product) grew at only a 1.4% annual rate in the last quarter of 2025 — has added to concerns.
And while unemployment has remained reasonably low, hiring has been slow, leaving experts to use words such as “frozen” and “stagnant” to describe the labor market. That situation has only been made more complicated by the U.S. war on Iran, which has driven oil prices upward, raising fresh fears of renewed inflation.
