Texas added nearly 47,000 nonfarm jobs in March, according to data from state and federal officials released Friday, buoyed by notable gains in mining and logging and the state’s large professional and business services sector.
The seasonally adjusted job additions represented a 0.3% increase from February, or a 0.8% increase compared to March 2025 — a figure that’s still slightly shy of the full-year 2026 growth rate economists have recently projected for the state. While in recent history Texas’ famously hot economy has often added jobs at a rate of around 2%, last year the state’s employment picture was virtually flat , and economists have projected a growth rate of around 1% for 2026, even as recent modeling from the Dallas Fed has pointed to growth that’s slightly stronger.
“It’s not back to trend growth,” Pia Orrenius, a senior economist at the Dallas Fed, said earlier this year, after the bank released its 2026 projection . “I don’t think that trend growth is really achievable given the labor supply constraints that we’re experiencing right now. So I think 1% is a good goal, that’s still a pretty good outlook for the year.”
The state’s March jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Texas Workforce Commission also represented a reversal from February, when the state actually lost around 23,000 jobs, according to BLS numbers. That monthly Texas downturn was in line with a similarly bleak national report — the U.S. economy shed about 92,000 jobs that month, pulled down by large job losses in healthcare and leisure and hospitality — while Texas’ March uptick also mirrored the national trend. In March, the U.S. economy gained 178,000 jobs, a number far beyond economists’ expectations. The reversal came in part from the return to work of tens of thousands of healthcare workers in California who had been striking over wages and safety issues.
In Texas, the March report showed an addition of 1,700 workers in the relatively small mining and logging sector and 14,900 workers in the larger professional and business services sector. The state also experienced some gains in leisure and hospitality, private education and health services, financial activities and trade, transportation and utilities, among other sectors.
Texas’ large government sector, however, was virtually flat, while other services — a category that includes jobs related to advocacy and administering religious activities, among others — recorded a loss of around 1,300 jobs.
In non-seasonally adjusted terms, Texas recorded a March unemployment rate of 4.1%, down from 4.4% a month earlier but up from 4.0% in March 2025. All of those figures were slightly lower than the corresponding national rates.
The March jobs reports come as the country has for months been experiencing a “low-hire, low-fire” economy, characterized by relatively few layoffs and job cuts but also relatively low hiring. A recent analysis by The Dallas Morning News found the trend was also prevalent locally, with North Texas companies reporting a particularly low level of layoffs in early 2026 while local job gains have slowed.
