Job creation in January proved stronger than expected.

The economy added 227,000 new jobs in the month and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.8 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday morning in the first jobs report published in the Trump era.

Forecasters in the private sector had expected around 175,000 new payroll jobs, adjusted for seasonality. Instead, strong gains in retail, construction, and finance led greater gains.

Friday's report suggests that the jobs recovery, already very old by historical standards, still has momentum as President Trump's administration settles in. Trump, however, was only in office for part of the month, and the data was collected before his inauguration.

Even with a big downward revision Friday to November's jobs numbers, job growth over the past three months has averaged a robust 183,000 a month.

Only about 100,000 new jobs a month, and possibly much fewer, are needed to keep pace with population growth and send the unemployment rate lower, according to Federal Reserve research.

Already, the unemployment rate is as low as Federal Reserve officials think it can go without eventually prompting inflation. And the rate ticked up by a tenth of a percentage point in January for the right reason, namely that the size of the labor force, which is the denominator in the calculation of the unemployment rate, grew. The participation rate rose two-tenths of a percentage point to 62.9 percent.

Trump, however, has pledged to dramatically accelerate the pace of job growth, and oversee the creation of 25 million new jobs in the next decade. In comparison, the U.S. has added just under 15.5 million jobs since 2010, a mark that includes significant catch-up from the mass layoffs of the financial crisis.

One small sour note to the report was that wage growth slowed, partly because one strong month fell out of the calculation, from 2.9 percent annually to 2.5 percent, back in line with the growth rate of recent years.

Yet even slower wage growth could ultimately be good news for the jobs outlook. Taking Friday's report together, with slow wage growth and growing workforce participation, it suggests that the jobs market is not yet so tight that the Fed has to raise interest rates to cool it off. Instead, it might wait longer in order to give it more "room to run," in the words of chairwoman Janet Yellen. "Notwithstanding strong job growth, renewed wage sluggishness & higher participation rate will make the #Fed more cautious about a March hike," tweeted Allianz economist Mohamed El-Erian.