Job openings rose to 7.7M in January

U.S. job openings rose at the start of the year, another sign the job market was solid when President Donald Trump returned to the White House.

U.S. employers posted 7.7 million vacancies in January, the Labor Department reported Tuesday, up from 7.5 million. The outlook for the labor market is murky as Trump wages a trade war with foreign countries, purges federal workers and threatens to deport millions of immigrants.

Layoffs fell slightly in January, and the number of Americans quitting their jobs rose.

The Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey showed that openings rose in real estate, health care, manufacturing and construction. Federal government agencies posted 135,000 jobs, down from 138,000 in December. The fallout from purges of federal workers by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is not expected to show up in labor market data at least until the February numbers come out.

“These January data included only the earliest days of DOGE-inspired layoffs of Federal workers,” Carol Weinberg and Mary Chen of High Frequency Economics wrote in a commentary. “There is no evidence of Federal Government layoffs in this report. That does not mean that layoffs in size in Federal workers will not be a big feature of the February report, scheduled for release on April 1.”

Weinberg and Chen said that Tuesday’s JOLTS report is unlikely to sway the Federal Reserve from its cautious approach toward cutting interest rates this year. The Fed is expected to leave its benchmark rate alone at its meeting next week. “The (Fed) will find no cause to rush to cut rates in today’s data,” they wrote. “The labor market does not need it, at least not yet.”

Openings are down from 8.5 million in January 2024 and a peak of 12.2 million in March 2022 when the economy was roaring back from COVID-19 lockdowns.

The American labor market has slowed from the frenzied hiring of 2021-2023. Employers added 168,000 jobs a month in 2024, decent but down from 216,000 in 2023, 380,000 in 2022 and a record 603,000 in 2021.

They created 125,000 new jobs in January and 151,000 in February. The unemployment rate is a low 4.1%.