U.S. employers added jobs at a robust clip in June, a sign of improving labor-market strength as the economic recovery heads into its sixth year.
Non-farm employment advanced a seasonally adjusted 288,000 last month, the U.S. Labor Department said Thursday. May's gain was revised up to 224,000 from 217,000, while April's improvement was upgraded to 304,000 from 282,000. That was the strongest gain since January 2012.
The unemployment rate, obtained from a separate survey of households, fell to 6.1% in June, the lowest level since September 2008. The improvement reflected more people finding jobs while the size of the workforce remained relatively steady.
Economists had projected payrolls to rise by 215,000 and the jobless rate to remain unchanged at 6.3%.
June marked the first five-month stretch of job creation in excess of 200,000 since the boom years of the late 1990s. The data send a welcome signal of economic health after output contracted in the first quarter at its fastest pace since the recession, an annualized 2.9% decline.
Economists attributed the depth of the first-quarter decline in output to a series of one-off factors like unusually cold weather and a drawdown of business inventories from unsustainably high levels at the end of 2013.
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