The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the April 2026 employment report on Friday May 8 at 8:30 a.m. Eastern. The consensus among Wall Street economists is for total nonfarm payrolls to come in around 145,000 to 160,000 jobs added, with the unemployment rate steady at 4.3 percent. ADP releases its private payrolls report on Wednesday May 6, which historically runs about a week ahead of the BLS print and gives traders a directional read. The April report will be the first full month of data that captures the federal hiring freeze and the ongoing Department of Homeland Security shutdown that began in mid February.
March 2026 set the baseline that April will be measured against. Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 178,000 in March. The unemployment rate moved up slightly to 4.3 percent from 4.2 percent in February. Job gains were concentrated in health care, construction, and transportation and warehousing, which combined for roughly 110,000 of the headline number. Federal government employment continued its decline and has now fallen for nine straight months. The federal workforce is down approximately 248,000 positions since the start of the second Trump administration, the largest sustained federal headcount reduction in the post World War II era.
Three sectors will draw the most analyst attention in the April print. Health care has been the most reliable contributor to monthly job gains for the last 18 months and is expected to add 50,000 to 60,000 jobs again, driven by hospital staffing and ambulatory care. Construction added 19,000 in March and is projected to slow to under 10,000 as housing starts pulled back to a 1.31 million annual pace and commercial construction tightened. Leisure and hospitality has been treading water near zero net change since January after running 30,000 monthly through 2024 and the first half of 2025. Federal government employment is expected to decline by another 12,000 to 18,000, which would mark the tenth consecutive monthly drop.
The DHS shutdown enters Day 84 on the morning the April report is released. Roughly 60,000 Transportation Security Administration officers and 50,000 Customs and Border Protection agents have been working without pay since the lapse began. The April reference week for the establishment survey covers the pay period that includes April 12. Furloughed federal workers who received no pay during that reference period are still counted as employed for headline payroll purposes under BLS methodology, which means the headline number will mask the full impact. The household survey, which is what produces the unemployment rate, treats furloughed workers as employed but absent from work, which pushed the U-6 underemployment rate to 8.9 percent in March from 8.4 percent in January.
Wage growth is the second number to watch. Average hourly earnings rose 0.3 percent in March and 4.1 percent over the prior 12 months, holding above the 3.5 percent rate that Federal Reserve officials view as consistent with 2 percent inflation. Wages in the services sector decelerated more sharply than goods producing wages over the last six months, which several Fed presidents have cited as a sign that the labor market is rebalancing without forcing layoffs. The April release will also include the first read on the labor force participation rate after the spring college graduation cycle began affecting the data.
The release lands four business days after the FOMC meeting that wraps up Wednesday April 29 with Chair Powell holding his next to last press conference before his term expires in May. Markets are pricing in an 87 percent probability of a hold at the current 3.50 to 3.75 percent target range. The June meeting carries a 60 percent probability of a quarter point cut. A weak April jobs print would push that June cut probability above 75 percent and accelerate the back end of the rally in two year Treasuries that has already pulled the yield to 3.92 percent. A hot print above 200,000 would do the opposite and could trigger a sharp repricing of the front end of the curve.
For Nashville and the broader Tennessee economy, the federal workforce drag is concentrated at BNA airport, the Veterans Affairs Tennessee Valley Healthcare System, and the Oak Ridge facilities through Department of Energy contractors. BNA staffing is down 11 percent since March according to local union representatives. The state added 4,200 nonfarm jobs in March per the latest Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development release, with health care and professional services leading. The Tennessee unemployment rate held at 3.7 percent.
What to watch in the release: the three month moving average of payrolls, which tells the underlying trend better than any single month; the diffusion index, which shows the breadth of hiring across industries; the change in part time for economic reasons; and the participation rate for prime age workers 25 to 54. Those four data points together will tell the Federal Reserve and the Treasury market whether the labor market is gradually cooling or losing momentum faster than the Federal Open Market Committee was forecasting at its March projections.