U.S. employers added 559,000 jobs in May, falling short of economists’s expectations for the second consecutive month, the Labor Department announced Friday.
While the figure is lower than the 650,000 jobs added that experts had predicted, the unemployment rate fell to 5.8 percent — its lowest level since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic last year. The unemployment rate marks a 0.3 percentage point drop from one month prior.
The increase was a major improvement from the revised 278,000 jobs added in April. The original figure, 266,000 jobs added, was the biggest miss versus expectations since Refinitiv started recording that data in 1999.