The March jobs report will be released on Friday. Here’s what to expect

Non-farm payrolls are expected to fall back – slightly – in March as consumers tune in for what is shaping up to be a healthy labor market.

The US economy is estimated to show a gain of 59,000 jobs for the month, an anemic rate compared to previous years in the last decade but enough to keep the unemployment rate at 4.4%.

If the estimate is reasonably accurate, it will show higher job growth for a labor market that did not generate jobs last year.

Immigration restrictions, demographic changes and environmental uncertainty have left companies desperate to hire or fire workers in droves, resulting in a stagnant labor market and a series of ho-hum monthly numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS will release the number Friday at 8:30 a.m. ET, although the stock market will be closed to celebrate the New Friday holiday.

“We have to redefine our idea of ​​what is a good or bad number of employees,” said Guy Berger, chief economist at Homebase, which provides workforce management services for small businesses.

A report like February’s showing job losses “would be raising alarm bells about the state of the labor market,” he added. “Now we’re like a very bad report, but it doesn’t scare anyone about the job market.

To agree with the views given by the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and other central bankers, Berger said he focused more on the unemployment rate as a measure of the stability of the labor market.

With changes in the labor force, a small increase in wages is required to keep the unemployment rate stable. The current unemployment rate of 4.4% is only 0.2 percentage points higher than last year, despite anemic wage growth.

In a recent report, St. Louis Fed updated previous research on the breakeven level for job growth. The bank’s economists now think that number could be as low as 15,000, with a high end of 87,000.

That’s a big drop from the most recent estimate in April 2025 that showed the unemployment rate at 153,000, and an update in August that year put the figure at between 32,000 to 82,000.

In other words, the labor market doesn’t need anywhere near the job growth it once needed to keep the population close to full employment.

“Things have gotten progressively worse over the last few years,” Berger said, but added, “There’s no sign that we’re going down.”

Some economists on Wall Street disagree. Goldman Sachs, Moody’s Analytics and others in recent days have raised their odds of a recession in the next 12 months, focusing on threats from a shrinking jobs picture and rising energy costs.

Earlier this week, BLS data showed that the hiring rate as a share of the labor force fell to 3.1%, its lowest level since the Covid-19 recession in 2020 and, before that, in January 2011.

However, Homebase’s data is consistent with other indicators, including ADP’s private sector earnings report for March, which showed a slight increase in wages. In February the 92,000 job losses were in part due to an already resolved strike at health care provider Kaiser Permanente that laid off about 31,000 workers in California and Hawaii.

The economy is highly dependent on health care for job growth. In fact, without this sector, last year there would have been more than half a million job losses.

ADP reported on Wednesday that private sector payrolls rose by 62,000, slightly above market expectations, but almost all of the growth came from health care, which saw a gain of 58,000 jobs.

Even that number masked the underlying weakness, said ADP chief economist Nela Richardson.

“Whether it’s the economy that’s driving growth is the question, because most of these jobs are low-paying home health aide jobs,” he said. “Not full-time jobs, full benefits, 401(k) jobs that help support consumer spending.”

EY Parthenon is one of the Wall Street firms that has raised its recession forecast. Lydia Boussour, senior economist at EY Parthenon, said health care “will be a key issue in the report.”

“We expect a very cold labor market in 2026, with stagnant employment, suppressed wage growth and a shrinking workforce as labor supply remains tight,” Boussour said. “Risks are rated low given the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, with a 40% chance of collapse.