Australia’s jobs market continues to show resilience, with unemployment in March growing slightly to 4.1 per cent.

Roughly 30,000 jobs were created after a shock 53,000 slump in February, but the number still came in under consensus expectations of nearly 40,000 jobs.

“With employment increasing by 32,000 people and the number of unemployed increasing by 3000 people, the unemployment rate rose slightly to 4.1 per cent for March,” ABS head of labour statistics Sean Crick said on Thursday.

The employment to population ratio remained at 64.2 per cent while underemployment remained at 5.9 per cent.

The participation rate decreased to 66.9 per cent but remained historically high, just 0.5 per cent below its record.

Monthly hours worked fell by 0.3 per cent, dropping for the second month in a row despite the uptick in employment.

“A higher than usual number of people reported working reduced hours this month due to bad weather, coinciding with ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred and other major weather events in NSW and Queensland,” Crick said.

With two weeks until quarterly inflation figures are released, VanEck’s head of investments and capital markets Russel Chesler said market expectations of a May rate cut from the Reserve Bank and three more for the year could be overblown.

“The continued resilience in Australia’s jobs market over the last three years, despite the steep rate hikes, along with continued growth in retail trade and property prices demonstrates that purely on this data there is little urgency for the RBA to accelerate its rate cut timelines,” he said.

Australian property values reached new heights in March, according to CoreLogic, up 0.4 per cent over the month. Retail sales were also been relatively strong, up by 0.2 per cent in February and 4.1 per cent year-on-year.

But the expectations of further easing from the RBA depended heavily on particularly damaging impacts of US trade policy on Australia, which were yet to be seen, Chesler said.

“No one knows what the final tariffs will be nor the impact, in our view a more realistic rate cut scenario for Australia would be two or maybe three cuts this year.”

-AAP