Health care is where the jobs are

In the Student Union at Portland State University, a representative of The Cupcake Girls had set up an information table on a recent weekday. The nonprofit organization helps sex workers and survivors of sex trafficking connect to mental health and health care services, and find housing and other support.

Community engagement manager and Portland State alum Grace Aasen offered passersby vegan cupcakes and information packets. “Would you like one?” she asked Nicolai Spitz, a junior studying advertising management. “Yeah, I love the mission,” Spitz replied, asking if the organization is hiring. Aasen said there aren’t any open positions right now, but “we’re always looking for volunteers and interns.”

“The sex trafficking and the sex-work industry is so important. I feel like it’s overlooked,” Spitz said. Thinking about her career options after she graduates, she added, “there might not be as much in advertising because of AI and everything, and I would love a health care or a social services kind of environment.”

Spitz’s job hopes are on the right track, statistically speaking.

The February 2026 BLS Jobs Report is expected to show employers added about 60,000 jobs, versus January’s gain of 130,000. And if ADP’s February private payrolls report is any guide, the lion’s share of those jobs will be in health care and social assistance — just like they were in the January jobs report and in pretty much all of the jobs reports released during 2025.

In the last 12 months, “we created 436,000 jobs in the health care sector,” said Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. That’s 121% of all the jobs added from January 2025 to January 2026.

The math makes sense because growth in health care, as well as the related category of social assistance — which added 320,000 jobs — made up for employment losses in other sectors.

“There’s not much growth anywhere else,” said Baker. “Federal government lost a lot of jobs, manufacturing lost jobs, scientific research lost jobs. Summing those together, over 100,000 jobs were lost.”

Expressed in percentage terms, employment in health care rose 2.4% year over year, while social assistance rose 6.4%. (The combined category rose 3.3%.) Total nonfarm payroll employment, meanwhile, rose just 0.2%. (Net changes in total employment and employment by sector are calculated using BLS Establishment Survey data.)

Peter Cappelli, professor of management at the Wharton School and director of its Center for Human Resources, explained what’s driving the growth: “Health care demand continues to rise, which is not too surprising. We’ve got a population that is aging. And we’re finding all kinds of new treatments to help people who used to be suffering or would just have died sooner.”

Health care workers aren’t very likely to lose their jobs to labor-saving technology or AI, said Cappelli. “It’s a classic service job, which is hard to automate.”

And it’s hard to send the work to be done by cheaper workers outside the U.S., said Ariel Avgar, director of the Center for Applied Research on Work at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

“A great deal of work in health care is human labor that needs to be done in treating actual patients in an actual location,” he said. “Health care is an anchored industry, and it’s difficult to outsource.”

On the flip side, it’s hard to keep workers around, Avgar said. “These are difficult jobs. In a lot of places, working conditions are quite tough. And so we see a lot of turnover, especially in the low-wage, front-line jobs.”

The fact that the government drives a lot of health care spending — through Medicare and Medicaid coverage and reimbursements, and Obamacare subsidies — makes the sector vulnerable to fiscal shocks, said Dean Baker.

“You do worry when so much of the labor market is dependent on one sector,” he said. “We could get President Trump and Congress deciding, ‘OK, we want to spend less on health care.’ And we’d see a lot of this job growth at least slow, if not stop.”

The field does have advantages for workers. Health care jobs are everywhere — rural and urban; in hospitals, neighborhood clinics, and people’s homes. There’s an abundance of lower-paying entry-level jobs, as well as higher-paying professional jobs. And there’s plenty of opportunity to upskill and retrain.

More on health care jobs

• From March 4, 2026: ADP reports private employers added 63K jobs, mostly in health and education

• From Dec. 16, 2025: In a slowing job market, health care and social assistance are still two bright spots

• From Sep. 3, 2025: Not much changed in July job market, but cracks are showing in health care sector