Is the American labor market white-hot or losing steam? The answer from the May jobs report: yes.

Why it matters: The labor market is roaring, with employers once again adding way more payrolls than forecasters anticipated.

• Still, there are signs of softening trends that could suggest we're at a turning point.

By the numbers: The labor market added 339,000 jobs last month, the largest gain since January. Job gains in the previous two months were also stronger than initially thought, revised up by a combined 93,000.

• A separate survey of households, however, shows employment declining.
• Some of the historic job market gains for marginalized workers melted away: The Black unemployment rate, for instance, hit an all-time low in April but jumped by nearly a full percentage point to 5.6% last month.

Of note: The household survey has a larger margin of error and is more volatile month-to-month. Economists tend to lean more on the survey of businesses, which is considered more reliable, especially after revisions.

• A big slump in the number of self-employed workers could explain why the household survey looks much weaker than that of establishments. (More on this below).

What they're saying: "There are clear signs the labor market is still hot, though it's cooling," Daniel Zhao, lead economist at job-finding site Glassdoor, tells Axios.

• "When you look under the hood of the report, permanent layoffs are rising."

What's next: Top Fed officials have strongly hinted they were inclined to "skip" an interest rate hike at its upcoming policy meeting. The details of today's jobs report might not be strong enough to change their minds.

• Headline jobs growth looks hot — a sign of still-strong demand on the part of employers. But that wasn't accompanied by accelerating wage growth, which is more likely to stoke inflation.
• Average hourly earnings rose 0.3% last month, slowing from the 0.4% pace in April. Notably, the share of prime-age workers employed or looking for work ticked up to 83.4% — the highest since January 2007.

The self-employment boom we saw during the pandemic recovery seems to have fizzled out.

Why it matters: We're not in a YOLO economy anymore. The days of quitting your job to follow your dreams peaked in mid-2021.

• Some of those efforts worked out — the number of people who formed an actual business employing themselves continues to rise. But in other cases, the self-employed effectively quit on themselves in order to take a job with an employer.
• In May, the number of unincorporated self-employed Americans fell by 369,000. Many of them will have been among the 339,000 workers added to formal payrolls last month.

By the numbers: There are now 8.73 million Americans who are self-employed without owning their own company. That's down from a peak of 9.51 million in August 2021, and it's even lower than the 8.89 million registered in January 2020, before the pandemic hit.

• Between the lines: Some of the fall might be attributable to the Hollywood writers' strike, notes The American Prospect's David Dayen.

The bottom line: When there are plenty of jobs to go around, Americans increasingly seem inclined to take one of them, rather than follow the dream of self-employment.