WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The U.S. economy added jobs for the first month since May and the nation’s unemployment rate held steady at 9.6% for the third straight month, suggesting the labor market may be stabilizing.

Nonfarm payrolls rose by 151,000 in October, higher than the 70,000 increase expected by economists surveyed by MarketWatch.

Stock futures moved modestly higher after the report was released, while Treasurys dropped and the dollar strengthened. Read complete MarketWatch coverage of Wall Street.

Adding to the sense of strength in the report, the government said that job losses in August and September were not nearly as bad as previously reported. The total upward revisions added 110,000 jobs in the two months.

Job losses in August were almost completely revised away and now show only a 1,000 loss. compared with prior estimate of 57,000 job losses. In September, 41,000 jobs were lost, up from the prior estimate of 66,000.

President Barack Obama called the report “encouraging” in brief remarks at the White House before leaving for an overseas trip to India and the G-20 summit. Read “Good news on payrolls isn’t good enough.”

Obama said he was open to any way to get the economy to grow faster and would seek to open markets to U.S. exports during his trip.

Analysts were also upbeat about the data.

“This is a good jobs report on many fronts. We’ve had ten straight months of private-sector job growth and it will probably continue to happen,” said Dice Holdings Inc. DHX, -0.44% chief executive Scott Melland in an interview. Job posting on the firm’s career web-site Dice.com are up 40% year-on-year in October, Melland said.

Excluding government workers, the economy added 159,000 jobs in October, the highest since April.

Despite the improvement, job growth is still not at strong enough to bring down the unemployment rate, which is above 9.5% for the fiftteenth straight month.

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The strength in the labor market came from services, including temporary help and computer systems. Health care employment also increased

Manufacturing employment fell 7,000 in October.

Since last December, the economy has only recaptured 874,000 of the 8.4 million jobs destroyed in the recession.

Earlier this week, the Federal Reserve called the pace of the recovery “disappointingly slow,” the jobs market in particular, and launched a new $600 billion bond-buying program to try to spur investment and risk-taking. Read MarketWatch’s Fed coverage.

Among the unemployed in October, the proportion who had been jobless for 27 weeks or more was 41.8%.

The number of people working part time who preferred full-time work declined by 318,000 to 9.2 million in the month.

The average workweek increased by six minutes to 34.3 hours.

Average hourly earnings in October rose 0.2% to $22.73. Economists had been expecting a 0.2% gain. Earnings are up 1.7% in the past year.

Factory hours rose 6 minutes to 40.3 hours in October while overtime in the sector was unchanged at 3.0 hours.