February 2020 was the last gasp of the pre-COVID economy. And things were going pretty well. The labor market was on a roll, adding jobs at a healthy pace. Unemployment was at a historically low 3.5%.

By April, with the pandemic in full swing, 22 million jobs had disappeared. Unemployment peaked that month at just shy of 15%. 

For a while, it seemed like the economy would never fully recover. But it did. By June 2022, nonfarm payrolls had surpassed their pre-pandemic level.

As of December 2024, there were 7.2 million more jobs in the economy than in February 2020. 

But there’d be about 11 million more jobs if the economy had kept adding them at the same pace it did in the five years before the pandemic.

So, have we fallen behind the pre-pandemic trend? Not exactly, according to Harvard economist Jason Furman, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under former President Barack Obama.

“Right now, we have 3.5 million more jobs than the Congressional Budget Office had been expecting for this point in time, prior to COVID,” Furman explained. “There’s more jobs, more employment, than the CBO and, I would say, just about anyone would have expected five years ago.”

Here’s how the math works. 

In the five years before the pandemic — February 2015 to February 2020 — the unemployment rate fell from 5.5% to 3.5%. At that point, said Furman, “no one on Earth thought the unemployment rate was going to keep falling from 3.5% to 1.5% over the next five years,” or that employment growth would keep up the same rapid pace.

In fact, what happened, despite the pandemic temporarily devastating the economy, is that job creation surged ahead of expectations in the post-2020 period.

The rapid labor market recovery from the pandemic, much faster than after the 2008 financial crisis, can be chalked up partly to aggressive government relief policies, said University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson, who served as chief economist at the Labor Department in the early 2010s.

“Unemployment insurance payments, the moratorium on having to pay your student loans, stimulus checks — all of that gave people some financial freedom to pursue new skills,” said Stevenson.

Furman pointed to another critical factor. “There’s been a huge flow of immigrants into the country. A lot of the extra jobs we have are even more about the extra immigrants than the labor force recovery,” said Furman.

Those new immigrants filled open jobs, alleviating labor shortages. They also generated new jobs by fueling demand for consumer goods, housing and services.

The pandemic brought about big changes in how we work. “Since COVID, we’ve seen fully remote, hybrid and everything in between, except some of the mandatory frontline work: construction, manufacturing, services,” said Jane Oates, senior policy adviser at WorkingNation.

Approximately 1 in 4 — or 23% — of employees were working from home or in a remote location for at least some period of time in December 2024, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That includes Ger Doyle, country manager in the U.S. for global staffing and recruitment agency ManpowerGroup.

Doyle started at the company in 2020. “I lived and breathed the whole roller coaster that we’ve had,” he said. “I interviewed remotely, onboarded remotely — based here in Florida, even though HQ is in Milwaukee.”

Doyle sees employees continuing to demand more flexibility in where and when they work, even though labor demand has cooled from the heady period when employers were staffing up again after the mass layoffs of the early pandemic.

“Late ’22, early ’23,” he said, “we had two open roles for every unemployed person. Today we’re down to 1.1 to 1. So you start to see that pre-COVID come back again.”

There was a downside to remote work early on, especially for working mothers, said Jasmine Tucker, vice president of research at the National Women’s Law Center. She had a 20-month-old at home when the pandemic hit.

“Those of us who were fortunate enough to have remote work, we were all doing it with our children with us,” said Tucker. “It feels so long ago, five years ago, but we were all here with little kids, virtual learning with bigger kids. It was a really stressful time.”

An analysis by her organization finds that five years later, it still is.

“We only just saw in 2024 the child care sector recover the jobs that it had lost,” said Tucker. “But when we look at population growth, there’s no way pre-pandemic child care workforce levels are going to be meeting the demand.”

Lately, a wide range of employers, including AT&T, Amazon, JPMorgan and the federal government, have issued orders to return to in-person work.

If remote work does decline, it’ll be a boon to downtown businesses dependent on office workers, said Jane Oates. But she also worries it will hurt vulnerable worker groups, including “people with disabilities who would have real struggles to work full time where they had to get assisted transportation, and find it much easier to work at their home site, where everything is adapted to their needs.”

In addition, single parents, she said. “Mostly women — but I don’t want to exclude men from that — who have been able to use the time that they would have commuted and needed child care.”

The pandemic shook up the labor market, untethering people from their previous jobs and careers. Quitting surged and salary offers climbed as employers scrambled to staff up again. Five years on, though, “people are not quitting. They seem very content in their jobs, or nervous to leave,” said Oates, noting that the quits rate is now below pre-pandemic levels.

“And employers are not laying off,” said Oates. “Employers seem equally happy with their employees.”

That’s partly because they still face a skills shortage, said Ger Doyle. In fact, to retain employees, many companies are trying to prevent worker burnout with new programs. “Mental health support, work-life balance, workplace inclusivity has been huge.”

Oates worries that workplace stress could spike again if the Donald Trump administration follows through on threats to reduce legal immigration and deport large numbers of unauthorized immigrant workers — who are heavily represented in sectors like construction, food processing and child and elder care.

“What happens when there are fewer people doing that job, when work gets harder because they’re doing the job of 1½ people?” she asked. “Do they have the flexibility with child care and transportation to work overtime? Will other people who are out of work be willing to take some of those jobs?”

Five years after the pandemic disrupted pretty much everything, economist Betsey Stevenson takes a broad view of where we are now. “It actually gives me a lot of hope for the future,” she said. “The American labor market has always been very well suited to having people reinvent themselves: upskill, reskill, change skills, find a new path.”

And become more productive. Worker productivity in the U.S. has been rising strongly.

“We ended up with the most dynamic labor market among developed countries,” Stevenson said. “We’ve seen real wage growth, [gross domestic product] growth, high labor-force participation.”

Stevenson said this is the kind of economic dynamism that characterized the U.S. in the 20th century, but hadn’t been much in evidence during the 21st — until the pandemic came along and shocked us into reinventing our economy.