IN A ROUGH LABOR MARKET, HIRING IN HEALTHCARE IS A CONSISTENT BRIGHT SPOT
After being laid off twice within a few years from jobs in corporate finance, Eric had grown weary.
So he opted to switch to a steady field that’s always looking for help: nursing.
Within a month of his April 2024 layoff from Citigroup, the MBA-holder based in Florida registered for classes and was back in school. He’s now a couple of months away from graduating and becoming an RN.
“I’ll be able to have a stable future,” said Eric, who asked to withhold his last name for privacy reasons. “I don’t have to worry about looking over my shoulder every six months.”
Indeed, the proliferation of health provider and care worker jobs is supporting what little growth exists in the labor market right now. While last year added just 116,000 new positions to the US economy, compared to the 1.46 million roles gained in all of 2024, the healthcare and social services industry kept its shine, with the supersector posting 686,000 new jobs.
That helped avoid an outright loss of positions in 2025 as the country shed jobs or saw little movement in sectors like manufacturing and finance. (Eric’s former field, it should be noted, saw more layoff news last week: Morgan Stanley is reportedly cutting 2,500 workers.)
Though healthcare’s massive job growth has been underway for decades — it became the country’s largest industry by employment in 2009 — the sector is of particular interest now to both policymakers and job seekers.
Social media is filled with queries from anxious Americans wondering if they should try to hack it in the health industry or remain in AI-vulnerable occupations. After all, healthcare is generally considered resilient even in times of economic upheaval — and jobs within the sector can provide solid wages.
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“On average … healthcare jobs have been good jobs over the last generation, two generations,” said Neale Mahoney, director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “We’ve seen faster wage growth in healthcare than in the rest of the economy; we’ve seen faster middle-class wage growth, driven by nurses and advanced practice professionals or mid-levels.”
Employment just among nurse practitioners, nurse anesthetists, and nurse midwives is expected to grow by 35% in the next decade, making it among the fastest-growing occupations in the country, according to the Labor Department. Median pay in the field, at roughly $132,000 per year, is also already far above the nation’s median annual wage of $49,500, and just about matches typical pay for software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers, government data shows.
“Demand is certainly rising,” Dr. Valerie Fuller, president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, told Yahoo Finance.
Registered nurses, meanwhile, can earn a median salary of nearly $94,000. Their field is also growing more quickly than other occupations.
That’s not to say the field is easy to break into, though, or that healthcare can absorb every out-of-work American. In a post titled “We Can’t All Be Nurses” from the Indeed Hiring Lab this week, researchers noted that “6 of the 10 occupational sectors most likely to require professional licensure are commonly associated with the healthcare and social assistance subsector.”
“These licensing requirements act as barriers to entry into what is, essentially, the only sector currently seeing a meaningful rise in payroll employment,” the researchers wrote. “This is especially true for healthcare licensures, which typically require some level of postsecondary education.”
Serving an older population
With job growth being so low amid changes in immigration and an aging workforce, the Labor Department’s monthly employment report is highly sensitive to swings in healthcare and social assistance employment.
In February, the country unexpectedly shed 92,000 roles, in part due to a large strike among healthcare workers. Even so, social assistance — which includes home and personal care aides for seniors and people with disabilities — still managed to gain 9,000 roles. Those jobs likely aren’t as well-paying.
Home and personal care aide jobs pay an average of $34,900 per year, according to government data, making them the lowest-paying jobs in the Labor Department’s list of the fastest-growing occupations. And more than half of last year’s gains in healthcare and social assistance jobs came from such positions within the “care economy,” Matthew Nestler, a senior economist at KPMG, found in his research.
Already, home healthcare and personal care aides are the country’s most common occupation, Nestler told Yahoo Finance — and “wages are low, turnover is 80%, if not higher.”
Still, “the healthcare and social assistance industry is pretty dynamic. If there were to be a [dominant] industry, because of the range of skills, occupations, types of jobs, it’s not a bad one,” Nestler said.
Emma Ockerman is a reporter covering the economy and labor for Yahoo Finance. You can reach her at [email protected].
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2026-03-08T16:33:16Z