Despite making up nearly a fifth of the U.S. economy and providing a much-needed set of crutches, the latest health care jobs data highlights just how wobbly the labor market is.
Over 28,000 jobs in the health care industry were lost in February, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report on Friday, making up nearly one-third of the 92,000 total jobs lost for the month. The dip marks the sector’s first decline in more than four years.
The sector has long been considered to be safeguarded from the factors that have led to a growing period of contracting employment in most other industries, such as tariffs, AI, and other economic uncertainties. Almost all growth last year came from health care and social services. While the U.S. economy saw an increase of only 116,000 jobs in 2025, the health care industry alone added 693,000 jobs. That means without the industry, the total U.S. economy would have lost roughly 577,000 jobs.
“Clearly, health care and social assistance have been propping up the labor market,” Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at hiring platform Indeed’s Hiring Lab, told Fortune.
But economists are not sounding the alarms just yet: The dip is not an immediate cause for concern as earlier in the year, the industry faced some of the largest nursing strikes in decades. But this stumble has laid bare how vulnerable the labor market is, should this one sector experience challenges in the future.
