That beat expectations from news outlets such as MarketWatch, which thought we'd see 80,000 jobs.
Economist Richard Stern of Advancing American Freedom called it a robust number for the month.
"And under the hood, the revisions are up close to 90,000, not quite, over both March and April. So, you've got three full months now of pretty good robust job growth. So, that's good. And that's a good full business quarter's worth."
In May, employment in local government rose by 55,000, largely reflecting a gain in local government, excluding education (+44,000).
Health care added 35,000 jobs in May, in line with the average monthly gain of 38,000 over the prior 12 months. Over the month, ambulatory health care services added 26,000 jobs, including a gain of 11,000 in home health care services. Employment continued to trend up in hospitals (+6,000).
Social assistance employment continued to trend up in May (+12,000), mostly in individual and family services (+10,000). Over the prior 12 months, social assistance had added an average of 17,000 jobs per month.
While tax reform could be one reason for the uptick in jobs, Stern said the last few months come after the Supreme Court's ruling against some of the Trump tariffs.
Advancing American Freedom is among the organizations that were opposed to tariffs, saying they're taxes that impact growth, among other things.
“As much as Trump has imposed other tariffs, the IEPA decision was something that the market had been waiting for close to a year as a signal about whether they could start making investments or whether tariffs were going to be a long-run thing.
“So, even though there are other tariffs going on, the fact that the court struck down the IEPA tariffs signals to the market, ‘Don't worry about it. These are not going to be a long-run permanent thing. You can go ahead and make investments and know that you'll be fine that way.’”
Job growth, in the period of IEPA, after March of last year through February was only 59,000.
It has been 565,000 just in the three months since then, Stern said.
“So, I think that's an interesting but underreported part of us."
The June jobs report is scheduled to be released July 2.
