Healthcare jobs have become the engine of America’s labor market

The Wall Street Journal – Wednesday, February 11, 2026
By Harriet Torry and Konrad Putzier

Over the past year, demand for healthcare workers has quietly propped up the labor market as other sectors reined in hiring or even shed jobs. On Wednesday, the full power of healthcare’s role burst into full view, and marked a clear shift in a labor market now geared toward the hard, often physical, work of caring for America’s aging population.

Nearly all of the 130,000 new jobs added in January were healthcare jobs or positions related to healthcare. The construction and manufacturing sectors also took on new workers, while employers cut jobs in government, finance, information and transportation and warehousing.

Healthcare is “way outperforming most of the rest of the economy,” said Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at jobs website Indeed.

Adding jobs is good news for economic growth, but economists say there is risk in such heavy reliance on one industry if that sector sees a slowdown. Plus, not everyone has the skills or desire to work in the field, Ullrich said.

Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the fact that healthcare jobs are spread around the country and relatively stable no matter how the economy is performing is favorable in this case.

“It would be a bigger risk if a very geographically concentrated sector were driving growth in the economy,” or a more volatile sector like manufacturing, he said.

Parts of the healthcare industry have become increasingly reliant on an immigrant workforce: The U.S. has long offered special visas for highly skilled foreign doctors willing to move to rural America, where the need for medical care is great. A surge of young immigrants and immigrants who arrived as part of resettlement programs filled nursing jobs and home health-aide jobs as demand for those positions continued to rise.

Foreign-born workers are particularly concentrated at the upper and lower ends of the skill ladder in healthcare. By 2024, they accounted for less than 15% of the U.S. population but 39% of home health aides, 28% of physicians and 24% of dentists, according to census data aggregated by IPUMS, a population database.

The rise of healthcare and construction jobs—because of the nation’s massive data center build-out—presents a puzzle in the job market: Since President Trump has severely restricted immigration and ramped up deportations, who is filling these jobs now?

Around one-quarter of workers in the construction industry are foreign-born, census data show. But the ratio is much higher in certain construction specialties, with immigrants making up around half of all drywall installers and roofers, 45% of painters, and 39% of general laborers.

Immigration raids are starting to take an economic toll on the construction industry, making workers harder to come by and slowing building projects.

“You just don’t have the access to the labor that you normally have,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM. The labor shortage is pushing up construction costs, making it harder to build badly needed housing. “It’s a hard supply constraint,” he said.

Demand is strong for data centers and high-end hospitality and residential projects, according to John Fish, CEO of Suffolk Construction Company. Hiring, he said, has become more difficult for mechanical, electrical, and plumbing trades because of retirements and immigration policy. “There’s a complete misalignment between demand and supply,” he said.

In the healthcare sector, demand for nurses and nurse practitioners is so strong that healthcare providers have to outbid each other, offering five-figure signing bonuses and generous paid time off, said Sari Gillen, a Houston-based healthcare recruiter at Goodwin Recruiting.

Many job candidates are juggling several offers, and she makes a habit of checking in on them every day to make sure they don’t jump to the competition. “It’s a race to the finish line,” she said.
A medical professional in teal scrubs and a hairnet pushes a stainless steel cart down a hospital hallway.

Healthcare jobs can be labor-intensive and less susceptible to automation than other skilled professions. Demand for healthcare workers is expected to remain strong as the U.S. population ages, although changes to Medicare payment rates pose a risk in the short term, companies say.

Some young people are drawn to healthcare careers in part because they offer high pay and relative job security. “It can definitely provide for you and your family,” said Savannah Grant, 28, an emergency department technician at a hospital in Sacramento, Calif.

Grant recently graduated with a degree in registered nursing and is optimistic about finding a job in her new field. Registered nurses in California often earn $70 or more an hour, which would help put a dent in her $100,000 student debt and pay for travel. “I am looking forward to being able to take trips and explore the world,” she said.

Ballad Health, a rural health system in Appalachia, currently has 500 positions in nursing it is trying to fill, due largely to higher demand from patients as they age into Medicare in their 60s.

In the six months starting in July, Ballad saw 7% growth in the number of people visiting its hospitals year-over-year. “It creates a huge demand for labor,” said CEO Alan Levine.

Guy Berger, senior fellow at labor-market think tank Burning Glass Institute, said he is less concerned than others about the economy’s reliance on healthcare for jobs. “Old people are not going away.”

While healthcare jobs have long been a jobs driver as the U.S. population ages, in recent years other sectors rapidly added jobs to meet demand for services like dining out and travel after the Covid-19 pandemic. Low borrowing costs after the brief 2020 recession also helped boost demand for jobs in the information sector—which includes roles like software developer—and the finance sector.

Demand for those jobs has mostly dried up now. The number of workers in professional and business services, finance, retail and information ticked down over the year through January. Federal-government payrolls declined sharply.

“I worry that the rest of the economy is shrinking,” said Justin Wolfers, professor of economics at the University of Michigan.

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