The April Jobs Report in 11 Charts

The pace of hiring picked up in April as employers added 211,000 jobs and the headline unemployment rate fell to 4.4%. Here’s a look at some of the other key data points in today’s monthly jobs report.

The overall pace of job gains has slowed somewhat, but remains healthy. The number of jobs has risen 1.5% from a year ago.

Hourly wage gains have slowed slightly, while weekly wage gains picked up a bit. Both increased about 2.5% from a year ago.

The Labor Department’s broader measures of unemployment, including discouraged workers, those marginally attached to the labor force, and part-time workers who want full-time employment, have continued to fall. The broadest measure of underemployment, which includes part-timers, has now fallen to the lowest rate since 2007. The headline unemployment rate of 4.4% has not been lower since May 2001.

The share of the population in the labor force—defined as those working or actively looking for work—has hovered at or just below 63% for most of the past year. The share of the population with jobs has slowly been rising, and climbed to 60.2% in April, the highest since February 2009.

For workers ages 25 to 54, who are unlikely to be retired or in school, the labor-force participation rate and the employment-to-population ratio are both higher and have been gradually rising in recent years.

During the recession and its immediate aftermath, people who became unemployed were more likely to drop out of the labor force entirely and stop seeking work. The share of unemployed people who give up on the labor force continued to fall this month.

Full-time jobs have been growing more quickly than part-time jobs.

Unemployment rates are coming down for workers at every education level.

Unemployment rates have also continued to trend down for different race and gender groups.

Early in the recession, the number of people who were unemployed for half a year or more had soared, but long-term unemployment has returned to nearly normal levels.

The median duration of unemployment is just over 10 weeks. That’s down by more than half from 2010 and 2011 but still elevated compared with a decade ago, or the late ’90s and early 2000s.

By JOSH ZUMBRUN
The April Jobs Report in 11 Charts