Heads up! We are minutes away from the release of the March jobs report, due out from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics at 8:30 AM ET.
The median forecast of the 90 market economists polled by Bloomberg calls for payroll gains of 200,000 in March, entirely from job creation in the private sector. The low estimate is 150,000 and the high estimate is 275,000. The median estimate of Twitter users 215,000.
The unemployment rate, meanwhile, is expected to tick down to 6.6% from 6.7%. Average weekly hours worked is expected to rise to 34.4 from 32.2. The length of the average work week has fallen over the last three months from 34.5 hours in November as weather has kept workers at home.
Wage growth is also in the spotlight.
In February, average hourly earnings rose 0.4% - the biggest monthly gain since June. The rise boosted the year-over-year change in earnings to 2.2% from 2.0%.
Economists predict monthly earnings growth slowed back down to 0.2% in March, which would further boost annual wage growth to 2.3%.
Today's release should clarify how much February's wage gains were a fluke.
"Specifically, it has been argued that some hourly wage workers still were paid even if the weather prevented them from working," explains Maury Harris, chief economist at UBS.
"If that were the case and if the hours worked of such workers were reported as down, reported average hourly earnings statistics would be upward biased. However, we have at least tentatively rejected that hypothesis. When we compared average hourly earnings changes and average workweek changes across industries in February, we did not observe the negative correlation implied by the hypothesis."
We will have the full release LIVE at 8:30 AM ET. Click here to refresh for the latest updates »