The U.S. job market is showing signs of life again—but if you work in an office, you might not feel it.
Friday's Bureau of Labor Statistics report showed the economy added 115,000 jobs in April, surpassing economist forecasts and marking two consecutive months of growth. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.3%. After the dismal 2025, when monthly job creation averaged just 10,000, the 2026 average has climbed to 76,000—prompting economists to wonder if the two-year "hiring recession" is finally over.
For many workers, the recovery is real. Health care added 37,000 positions, transportation and warehousing gained 30,000, and social assistance jobs ticked upward. For most of the past two years, health care and the public sector were the only areas hiring consistently—until federal workforce cuts left health care carrying the load alone.
Now the recovery is spreading. "The job market is moving from low-hire, low-fire mode into moderate-hire, low-fire mode," wrote Bill Adams, chief U.S. economist at Fifth Third Commercial Bank.
Except in the office.
The information sector—which includes tech, telecommunications, data processing, and media—shed 13,000 jobs in April. Finance lost another 11,000. This year, information has lost an average of 9,000 jobs per month, while financial activities have dropped 12,000 monthly on average.
Kevin Gordon, senior investment strategist at Charles Schwab, pointed out on X that information sector employment has fallen to its lowest level since March 2021, erasing four years of gains. The sector has now posted 16 straight months of job losses—one of the longest peacetime declines in any major sector in modern records.
The details are telling. Telecommunications cut 3,000 jobs. Motion picture and sound recording eliminated 6,000. And the category covering cloud and data infrastructure providers—supposedly the backbone of the AI boom—lost 4,000 more positions.
That last one is particularly striking. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta have pledged roughly $725 billion to AI infrastructure this year alone. Yet the workers who operate those data centers continue to disappear from payrolls.
Is AI eating these jobs? Economists hesitate to draw a direct line. Companies citing AI in layoff announcements may simply be using the technology as justification to trim costs after pandemic-era overhiring. But as Gordon noted, it's remarkable that tech stocks can hit record highs while tech employment as a share of total jobs sits at record lows.
Workers who still have jobs are facing a different problem: their paychecks aren't stretching as far. Average hourly earnings rose 3.6% over the past year, but inflation is expected to hit 4% in April when the Consumer Price Index is released next week, driven up by the war in Iran and gas prices that have surged past $4.55 per gallon.
Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, expects real average hourly earnings to be flat or negative for April, and "definitely negative" once May's data arrives as the Middle East supply shock fully hits the economy.
As Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, put it on X: "Workers have jobs, but this is a squeeze."