WASHINGTON — U.S. employers added a surprisingly strong 130,000 jobs last month, but government revisions cut 2024-2025 U.S. payrolls by hundreds of thousands.

The unemployment rate fell to 4.3%, the Labor Department said Wednesday.

The report included major revisions that reduced the number of jobs created last year to just 181,000, a third the previously reported 584,000 and the weakest since the pandemic year of 2020.

The job market has been sluggish for months even though the economy is registering solid growth.

But the January numbers were much stronger than the 75,000 economists had expected. Healthcare accounted for nearly 82,000, or more than 60%, of last month’s new jobs. Factories added 5,000, snapping a streak of 13 straight months of job losses. The federal government shed 34,000 jobs.

Average hourly wages rose a solid 0.4% from December to January.

The unemployment rate fell from 4.4% in December as the number of employed Americans rose and the number of unemployed fell.

“The surprisingly strong job gains in January were driven mainly by health care and social assistance,” Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, wrote in a commentary. “But it is enough to stabilize the job market and send the unemployment rate slightly lower. .. but it is stabilizing. That’s an encouraging sign to start the year, especially after the hiring recession in 2025.”

Weak hiring over the past year reflects the lingering impact of the high interest rates the Federal Reserve engineered in 2022 and 2023 to counter surging inflation, as well as Elon Musk’s purge last year of the federal workforce. The chaos from President Donald Trump’s erratic trade policies also made businesses less willing to hire.

Dreary numbers had been coming in ahead of Wednesday’s report. Employers posted just 6.5 million job openings in December, fewest in more than five years.

Payroll processor ADP reported last week that private employers added an unexpectedly weak 22,000 jobs in January. And the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that companies slashed more than 108,000 jobs last month, the most since October and the worst January for job cuts since 2009.

Nicole Bachaud, a labor economist with ZipRecruiter, said new data Wednesday could signal “the start of a revival in the labor market.”