More jobs in April, but fewer Americans working, and wage growth still lame

Even as gas prices go through the roof and everyday Americans feel bad about the economy, the job market kept moving along in April. Looking at Friday's US jobs report, it was a second straight month of six-figure job growth, something that didn’t happen in all of 2025.

Total nonfarm payroll employment edged up by 115,000 in April, after showing little net change over the prior 12 months. In April, job gains occurred in health care, transportation and warehousing, and retail trade. Federal government employment continued to decline.

In April, health care added 37,000 jobs, in line with the average monthly gain of 32,000 over the prior 12 months. Over the month, job gains occurred in nursing and residential care facilities (+15,000) and home health care services (+11,000).

Transportation and warehousing employment increased by 30,000 in April, reflecting a gain in couriers and messengers (+38,000). However, employment in transportation and warehousing is down by 105,000 since reaching a peak in February 2025.

I was trying to figure out what these Couriers and Messengers jobs are, and why they grew by so much last month. Here’s how the Bureau of Labor Statistics defines it.

Pick up and deliver messages, documents, packages, and other items between offices or departments within an establishment or directly to other business concerns, traveling by foot, bicycle, motorcycle, automobile, or public conveyance. Excludes “Light Truck Drivers”

Looks like a lot of these jobs are in medical labs and hospitals, along with regular delivery services. And Wisconsin had a surprisingly large amount of these types of jobs 3 years ago, with the 3rd highest concentration in the country, and by far the most in the Midwest.

But this sector has barely above 1 million jobs nationwide, and its “growth” in the last 2 months has been entirely seasonally adjusted. The BLS's models counted on more layoffs in March and April, and when that didn’t happen, the seasonally adjusted numbers went up.

Couriers and Messengers job change, seasonal vs non-seasonal
March 2026
Seasonally-adjusted +21,700
Non-seasonally adjusted -14,700

April 2026
Seasonally-adjusted +37,900
Non-seasonally adjusted +1,400

Look, there are a lot of industries that have their job numbers deflated in April as the weather warms, so this isn’t a big deal and I’d call the overall jobs numbers for April “decent to good”. But I will also say that when 1/3 of your job “growth” is due to a seasonal adjustment, it’s not great.

And the household survey wasn’t good at all.

The unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.3 percent in April, and the number of unemployed people changed little at 7.4 million. Both measures changed little over the year….

Both the labor force participation rate, at 61.8 percent, and the employment-population ratio, at 59.1 percent, changed little in April. These measures edged down over the year after accounting for annual population control adjustments.

That 59.1% figure in the employment-population ratio is the lowest non-COVID rate since September 2014, and the 61.8% participation rate is the lowest non-COVID level since the start of 1977!

This "edging down" means the number of people in the US labor force and the number of people ID’ing as employed have each declined by more than 1 million in the last 12 months.

I've got the trendline up on these because the big drop at the start of 2026 is due to the benchmarking that happened in March 2026, where the BLS followed lower population growth figures by saying the US labor force and number of people employed had shrunk more than first reported.

That's due to immigration has been limited under Trump 2.0 and older workers keep retiring and not being replaced. And White House adviser Kevin Hassett tried to turn those declining labor force and participation numbers into a good thing when asked about it on Fox News.

FOX NEWS: The negative is that labor supply is shrinking. You've got baby boomers retiring, you've got less illegal immigration, you got more deportations. How do you factor that in? HASSETT: I don't think that's a negative. I think it's a positive. You've got more good jobs for legal Americans.

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 8, 2026 at 8:38 AM

Except that’s not happening, Kevin! Nearly 1 million of the drop in the labor force are from native-born Americans, and more than 1.1 million of the drop in employment over the last 12 months and is from native-born Americans (with more than 1.0 million being native-born American men).

In addition, wage growth sucks for American workers.

In April, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 6 cents, or 0.2 percent, to $37.41. Over the year, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.6 percent. In April, av>erage hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees rose by 11 cents, or 0.3 percent, to $32.23.

While slightly above the 3.4% year over year increase in March, it's still a lot lower than what we were seeing during the last bout of gas price spikes in 2022.

This wage increase is also barely above the 12-month change of 3.3% between March 2025 and March 2026 in the Consumer Price Index, which means wage growth will likely fall below the 12-month inflation rate that shows up in April’s CPI report, which comes out next week.

So sure, the payrolls numbers look good on the April jobs report, and there's no evidence that we are in any kind of overall recession. But a number of other employment indicators tell us that things are far from booming, and many Americans (working and otherwise) aren't able to keep up with the higher prices that have become an increasing part of life in May 2026. Which goes a long way toward explaining why American consumer sentiment is at its lowest point in decades. And what could come along to change that for the coming months?

Well, turn around consumer sentiment positively, that is. If we start seeing unemployment being closer to 5% than 4% and this bump up in job growth reverse....LOOK OUT!