US economy undershoots forecasts with 57,000 jobs added in June

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The US economy fell short of Wall Street expectations to add 57,000 jobs in June as the labour market cooled and a World Cup hiring spree petered out, prompting traders to scale back expectations of interest rate rises.

Thursday’s figure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics marked a sharp fall from the downwardly revised 129,000 jobs added in May and was less than half of the 115,000 predicted by economists in a Bloomberg poll.

The April hiring figure was also revised down to 148,000, representing a combined 74,000 job reversal in April and May.

June’s job gains were the weakest this year, with the exception of a weather-driven decline in February, marking a significant cool-down in the labour market after three months of bumper hiring.

Thomas Simons at Jefferies said payrolls had “stumbled a bit after several months of solid jobs data”.

Despite the drop, job growth remained well above the 10,000 jobs added each month on average in 2025. The June unemployment rate ticked down to 4.2 per cent from 4.3 per cent in May, as more people left the labour market.

This year’s recovery in hiring has assuaged concerns among Federal Reserve policymakers, allowing them to shift their focus towards tackling the surge in inflation triggered by the war with Iran, which pushed inflation to a three-year high of 4.2 per cent in May.

New Fed chair Kevin Warsh’s strident comments about tackling inflation, which he described as “a burden for the American people”, have boosted market bets on higher interest rates in the coming months.

But the dollar slid on Thursday as investors reined in their expectations of near-term action by the Fed. The currency was down 0.7 per cent against a basket of rivals, extending earlier losses following the jobs data.

Futures traders are now expecting the central bank to lift borrowing costs by December. Previously, such a move was expected by October.

US stocks were up modestly on Thursday morning following the release of the data, with both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite up less than 1 per cent.

June hiring was dragged down by a drop-off in jobs in the leisure and hospitality sector following a boost in recent months from the football World Cup, which is being hosted in cities across the US.

While professional and business services, social assistance and healthcare all added jobs in June, leisure and hospitality shed 61,000 roles, which the BLS said pointed to “weaker than usual seasonal hiring”.

“Looks like the World Cup hiring spree ended in May,” said Brian Bethune, an economics professor at Boston College, noting the “huge change in leisure and hospitality” employment numbers from May to June.

He said the report suggested that “there might have been . . . optimistic hiring that then had to be scaled back” but cautioned that temporary distortions of this kind “really bounce these monthly numbers around”.

The drop in the unemployment rate to a 12-month low, meanwhile, was “something of a puzzle”, said Samuel Tombs at Pantheon Macroeconomics.

The decline was fuelled in part by older people leaving the labour market, potentially choosing early retirement on the back of stock market gains, said Tombs. He said there was a risk that some of the recent fall in participation could unwind in the coming months, pushing the unemployment rate back up.

Economists were broadly sanguine about the June hiring slowdown, which they said was probably more reflective of underlying job growth than the bumper numbers of recent months.

Eric Winograd, chief US economist at AllianceBernstein, said that though the employment figures were weaker than expected, they were “not weak in outright terms”.

“It’s not a terrible report, but it should take some heat out of the expectation that the Fed is about to raise rates immediately,” he added.