Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Chart by Amanda Cox.

The United States added 244,000 nonfarm payroll jobs on net in April, the Labor Department reported today, up from a gain of 221,000 jobs in March. The April employment number showed the fastest growth since last spring, when the federal government was adding hundreds of thousands of temporary jobs for the decennial census.

Nearly every sector added jobs last month. Some of the biggest gains were in retail, professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, and manufacturing. The losers were state and local governments, which have been struggling with budget issues. They are expected to continue shedding workers in months to come.

Even most of the winners, though, have a long way to go before returning to their prerecession levels, if they ever do.

The chart above shows economy-wide job changes in this last recession and recovery compared with other recent ones, with the black line representing the current downturn. Since the downturn began in December 2007, the economy has shed, on net, about 5 percent of its nonfarm payroll jobs. And that does not even account for the fact that the working-age population has continued to grow, meaning that if the economy were healthy we should have more jobs today than we had before the recession.

The unemployment rate — measured by a different government survey, and based on how many people are without jobs but are actively looking for work — ticked up to 9 percent in April, from 8.8 percent in March. My colleague David Leonhardt explained in an earlier post how these two surveys have shown divergent trends in recent months.