Good news for job seekers in March as the private sector added 120,000 new positions, helping unemployment fall to just 8.2 percent according to a Labor Department report released on Friday.
While the rate has steadily dropped over the last few months thanks to a stock market on the rise, economists actually expected 210,000 jobs to be added in March with an unemployment rate of 8.3 percent. Investors however won’t be able to react to the news on Wall Street until Monday with the markets in the U.S. closed today in observance of Good Friday.
While March wasn’t the stellar month analysts had expected they did see better than expected numbers in February after a revised statement from the Labor Department increased jobs numbers from 227,00 to 275,000, slightly better than expected during a six-month period that has seen more jobs added than anytime since the 2008 financial meltdown.
January in the meantime was slightly lowered upon revised numbers from 284,000 to 275,000. Analysts believes the revised numbers were the results of a mild winter.
During an election cycle a decrease in unemployment rates is a big selling point or President Obama and he appears to have plenty of good news as two independent reports also showed promise for the job market, CareerBuilder reports that quarterly job adds are increasing for employers which means more jobs will be up for grabs, specifically in terms of full-time positions.
Gallup in the meantime discovered that job market conditions in March reached their best level since August 2008 with the company’s Job Creation Index jumping from +14 in February to +18 in March.
Unemployment claims are also down to their lowest level in four years after falling by 357,000 in the final week of March.