Jobs Report Live Updates: U.S. Adds 227,000 Jobs in November

While it was hardly a dramatic move, the reading added to a growing body of evidence that the labor market is not accelerating. That could give Fed officials the wiggle room they need to continue lowering interest rates without worrying that they are drastically heating up the economy.

Markets — which have been oscillating between heavily betting on a rate cut later this month and marking down the chances — increased the odds of a reduction after Friday’s jobs report.

Central bankers raised their policy rate to about 5.3 percent in 2022 and 2023 and then held it there for more than a year in a bid to slow the economy and bring rapid price increases under control. But inflation has come down meaningfully, so officials began to lower the rate in September. They cut it for a second time in November, to a range of 4.5 to 4.75 percent.

Now, Fed policymakers are trying to strike a careful balance as they contemplate their next moves. They want to avoid keeping interest rates too high for too long — doing so might slow the economy so much that it precipitates a painful recession. But they also want to avoid lowering rates so much and so quickly that the economy booms, giving companies the wherewithal to raise prices and preventing inflation from coming fully under control.

Officials are likely to keep those trade-offs in mind both as they vote on their December rate decision and as they contemplate how quickly and how much to lower rates in 2025.

Friday’s employment report is the final snapshot of the United States labor market that central bankers will glimpse before their Dec. 17-18 meeting, the Fed’s last policy meeting of 2024.

Officials are unlikely to hang their entire decision on the report: Hiring data in particular have been affected by strikes and hurricanes, so any signal it offered was muddled. And officials are also focused on what is happening with inflation. A fresh Consumer Price Index report is set for release on Dec. 11.

Still, Friday’s figures do matter, in part because this is the last major data point officials will receive before they enter their pre-meeting blackout period, during which officials do not speak in public about their outlook for interest rates.

They come at a time when growth has been proving stronger than expected, and when inflation has been a bit stickier than many economists had anticipated. Both of those trends could argue for a slower pace of rate cuts going forward.

Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said during an interview at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit this week that “we’re in a very good place with the economy,” noting that growth had been stronger and the unemployment rate was still at a “very, very low level.”

Compared with when the Fed began to cut rates in September, “the labor market is better, and the downside risks appear to be less, in the labor market,” Mr. Powell said, explaining that the Fed could be more “cautious” with its moves.

Of course, if a strong economy were to deter Fed officials from cutting interest rates as much as they otherwise would have next year, that could put the central bank on a crash course with the incoming administration.

Donald J. Trump, the president-elect, has a track record of pushing for lower interest rates — and blasting the Fed on social media and in public when it fails to deliver them.

But the Fed is independent of politics, and its officials regularly say that they set rates solely based on what they see and expect to see in the economy.