One figure that is frequently overlooked in the typical headlines about the unemployment rate is 170.7 million. As of early 2025, that was the largest number of Americans ever counted in the labor force. It’s a subtle milestone that’s easy to overlook in the context of monthly employment reports, but it shows how much the nation’s economic engine has expanded despite the fact that its composition is constantly changing.
The image that appears when you break down that workforce by industry isn’t the one that most people have in mind. Approximately 8% of non-farm jobs are in manufacturing, which was once thought to be the backbone of the American economy. In contrast, more than 24 million people are employed in the healthcare and social assistance sector, which continues to grow at a faster rate than nearly every other industry monitored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When you look at it year over year, there isn’t much of a change. However, if you go back five or ten years, the change appears to be almost structural.
The evidence can be seen in the skyline of any midsize American city. Campuses of hospitals continue to grow. Old strip malls that once housed furniture stores are now home to urgent care centers. In the meantime, the manufacturing facilities on the outskirts of town frequently have the same appearance as they did ten years ago: they are busy but not obviously expanding. Healthcare is perceived as the new factory floor of the American labor market, employing people in a manner similar to that of steel mills in Pittsburgh or auto plants in Detroit.
Second place goes to professional and business services, which employ nearly 23 million people and include everything from accountants to IT consultants to building management personnel. It’s a vast category that is almost too wide to feel like a single “sector” in the conventional sense, which is illuminating in and of itself. Unlike in the past, when it was centered around steel or oil, the modern economy is not structured around a single dominant industry. It is dispersed in ways that defy neat labeling in client sites, home offices, and office parks.
In this discussion, the government continues to be an underappreciated employer. Nearly 24 million jobs are created by federal, state, and local organizations combined; the majority of these jobs are in local government, which includes public works crews, teachers, and police. Although the local school district and the mayor’s office are rarely considered to be part of “the workforce” in everyday speech, their combined payrolls are comparable to those of entire private industries.
The ledger’s slower-moving side comes next. A tiny portion of the country’s workforce—just over 600,000—is employed in mining and logging. Infrastructure spending and, in some areas, housing shortages that don’t seem to be getting better have kept construction relatively stable. Even though it still employs more than 15 million people, retail trade, once one of the biggest employers in the nation, has been steadily losing ground to automation and e-commerce.
This does not imply that the American economy is suddenly collapsing or changing. It is less cinematic and moves more slowly than that. Mining becomes somewhat smaller. Healthcare is expanding rapidly. Government is in control. It’s the kind of shift that only becomes apparent when comparing data from one decade to another, and even then, it’s important to consider how far this trend toward services, particularly care work, will go before something else replaces it.
