By Catherine Dunn

Healthcare stole the show in the latest jobs report, delivering 82,000 out of 130,000 job gains in January. But it should come as no surprise, given an aging population and decades of job growth in that sector.

"The decline in manufacturing share has gotten a lot of attention, but that has missed the fact that there are other opportunities that are emerging in the economy," says Joshua Gottlieb, an economist and professor at the University of Chicago. "That is increasingly in services and increasingly in healthcare."

Gottlieb and a team of researchers studied trends in healthcare jobs and wages over four decades. Between 1980 and 2022, healthcare employment outpaced non-healthcare growth at an annual rate of 2.1% versus 1.1%, according to their working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Employment in healthcare nearly doubled between 1990 and 2022, to 18.1 million.

In more recent years, a category of so-called "midlevel" jobs took off. These would include nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and certified nurse midwives. Between 2010 and 2022, the number of midlevel workers more than doubled, from 227,000 to 505,000.

For workers in those types of roles, "there are a lot of things they can do to provide care with either limited physician supervision or no physician supervision," says Gottlieb.

Wage gains across healthcare also struck the researchers. "It's not so much a story about gains accruing just at the top," notes Gottlieb. "There's a lot of wage growth in the middle, in more achievable, more relatable jobs perhaps."

As one point of comparison, the median wage for a non-healthcare worker in 2022 was $24 an hour, versus $27 hourly for overall healthcare workers and $34 hourly for clinical healthcare workers.

The proliferation of midlevel jobs opens a path for healthcare workers to upskill over time and increase their earnings.

What's driving this? A few factors are at play. Because of restrictions on expanding medical schools and residency programs, it's difficult to train more doctors, Gottlieb says.

Hiring midlevels responds to that gap at a time of high demand. More treatments are available now than in the past, and people seek out that care. Then there's the big driver: an aging U.S. population.

"As we see the population aging pretty significantly, there's going to be a lot more demand for healthcare services," says Nicole Bachaud, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter.

The demographics factor also sets healthcare job growth apart in some ways. "We see different growth patterns than we see in industries that are tied to business outcomes and economic cycles," Bachaud says.

Yet training and hiring in healthcare can be susceptible to funding reductions, such as the cuts to government spending on Medicaid over the next decade.

The role of government funding in healthcare "does make it a little more complex than other industries," Bachaud says.

Write to Catherine Dunn at catherine.dunn@dowjones.com

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February 13, 2026 13:15 ET (18:15 GMT)

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