WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — After adding 162,000 jobs in July, the United States has now regained more than four-fifths of the 8.8 million jobs lost in the private sector during the last recession. That’s the good news.

The bad news is the private sector won’t match its all-time employment high until early 2014 at the current pace of hiring — nearly five years after the recovery began. And the economy is still missing millions of jobs that would have been created if the U.S. had experienced a more normal rebound.

In what fields are most of the jobs in the U.S. being created? And what do they pay? Click to find out.

Also: Read about the jobs growth the U.S. saw in July.

— Jeffry Bartash

Tempered view of professional hiring

The segment of the economy that has added the most jobs since the recession ended in June 2009 is classified as “professional and business services.” About 2.17 million jobs have been created for architects, engineers, scientists, managers, computer geeks, and yes, journalists.

This is normally high-paying work with an average hourly wage of $28.47 an hour, which translates into $1,139 per 40-hour week. But there is a wide range. Some occupations such as computer design pay more than $40 an hour and others like upholstery cleaning pay less than $20 an hour.

Unfortunately, almost half of the new professional jobs since mid-2009 were created at temporary-hiring agencies. The work doesn’t always lead to a full-time job and these positions pay far less: about $15.75 an hour. Many people clearly like temp jobs, but others have no choice.

The percentage of temps in the private-sector workforce has nearly matched an all-time high of 2.4% set at the end of the Internet boom in early 2000.

We are here to serve you

The leisure and hospitality trades have created 1.13 million new jobs in the past four years and now employ more workers than ever. That’s a lot of new jobs for waiters, tour guides, ticket vendors and hotel cleaners.

A surge in these kind of jobs is a double-edged sword. When consumers spend more going out to bars, restaurants, museums and casinos, they are feeling better about the economy and the security of their own jobs. That usually signals better times ahead.

On the other hand, this line of work doesn’t pay especially well: just $13.48 an hour. If tips are included, the pay is somewhat better but not enough for most single earners to raise a family.

Doctor, doctor, give me the news

The medical profession didn’t slow down much even during the worst of the 2007-2009 downturn. The health-care industry generated 1.01 million jobs in the past four years and remains one of the fastest growing parts of the economy. It now employs 14.56 million people.

Or how about this. The health-care industry has added jobs every year since the government first began to keep track in 1990. The average pay is also pretty darn good: $26.66 an hour ($55,450 a year).

Clearly a large slice of the hiring reflects the aging of the Baby Boomers and the need for health providers to cater to their needs. The advent of “Obamacare,” the president’s signature health reform law, is also likely to boost employment.

The high cost of health care, however, is also a drag on the economy. Consumers have to fork over a greater share of their income on doctors, hospitals and drug prescriptions and have less to spend on other goods and services.

Details on retail still not pretty

Retailers have boosted employment by 706,000 since the recession ended, making the industry the fourth fastest growing segment of the economy.

Yet in a sign of lingering weakness in the U.S., the retail industry is still a half-million jobs short of its high-water mark of 15.6 million workers. Scarred by the Great Recession, Americans just aren’t spending as much.

Nor is retail a lucrative line of work. The average salary is just $16.58 an hour — about 30% less than the nationwide average. And the average employee works less than 32 hours a week, partly reflecting the volatility of consumer-shopping patterns. Retailers don’t need the same number of workers each month.

Hard hats hard hit

Manufacturing and construction are laggards by comparison. These typically well-paying industries have failed to recover most of the jobs lost during the downturn.

The construction trade, for example, employs 135,000 fewer workers now compared to when the recession ended even though builders have been steadily adding jobs since 2011.

What’s more, there are 1.93 million fewer people in construction compared to 2006, when the number of workers peaked at a record 7.73 million. That gap alone explains why U.S. employment has failed to returned to precession levels.

Manufacturers, for their part, have added a modest 316,000 jobs since the end of the recession, but the industry employs 2 million fewer workers compared to seven years ago.

Workers in construction earn an average of $26.21 an hour and those in manufacturing receive $24.37 an hour.

Government jobs harder to come by

The one major part of the economy that’s actually continued to shed jobs since the end of the recession: government.

Employment at the local, state and federal levels has fallen by 664,000 to 21.9 million — with most of the jobs lost since mid-2010.

For a little perspective, that’s the fewest number of people working in government since the beginning of 2006.

What’s more, you have to go back to Reagan years in the early 1980s to find the only other period since World War Two in which there’s been a similarly large drop in government employees.