CHICAGO — Shrugging off concerns about the economy's flagging momentum, U.S. employers added a larger-than-expected 180,000 new jobs in March and the nation's jobless rate slipped to 4.4 percent, matching a five-year low, the Labor Department reported yesterday.

Although the latest report got a bit of help from unusually mild weather, the figures made it very clear that, in contrast to widespread expectations, the overall labor market remains very solid despite weakness in a couple of key sectors.

"This is a great report, and it shows the underlying strength in the economy," said First Advisors economist Brian Wesbury. "We're seeing a very strong economy, outside of housing."

Although there were "probably some weather effects" in the March figures, ClearView Economics commentator Ken Mayland said, "most aspects of this jobs report imply good things for the economy."

But the job market's unwillingness to cool down threatens to trigger concerns about wage inflation at the Federal Reserve. Those inflation concerns, in turn, will likely dim any prospect that the Fed will move to lower interest rates anytime soon.

Yesterday's report "is likely to keep the Fed focused on inflation as the predominant risk," suggested Barclays Capital economist Dean Maki.

Because the report came out on a day when U.S. stock markets were closed in observance of Good Friday, investors won't be able to react to the data until Monday.

In a shortened session, bond prices predictably weakened yesterday on the evidence that the economy is in better shape than many people had thought. Bonds already in the market generally gain in value when an interest-rate cut is likely.

"The labor market is clearly a source of significant upside risk to inflation," said Economy .com's Aaron Smith, and the bond market "is being forced to take notice."

A number of observers had been expecting the nation's unemployment rate would inch up to 4.6 percent from 4.5 percent in February. Instead, it declined to 4.4 percent, matching a five-year low set in October.

The improvement in the jobs picture was broad-based, but it also served to underscore the financial gap that exists between America's most and least educated workers: For Americans with at least a bachelor's degree, the jobless rate edged down to 1.8 percent from 1.9 percent, while for workers without a high school diploma, it slipped to 7.0 percent from 7.1 percent.

"If you want to understand the nature of the 'income gap,' there it is," said Mayland.

Yesterday's report comes at a time when the U.S. economy has lost a good portion of the powerful growth it enjoyed in recent years, and its future trend is murky.

Although the Fed's slow-but-steady campaign of interest-rate hikes — it raised its benchmark rate 17 straight times from June 2004 until August 2006 — did little to slow the economy early on, by last summer higher borrowing costs had pushed the once white-hot residential construction sector into a painful pullback.

Those higher rates have sparked a surge of mortgage defaults among the most economically vulnerable Americans, generating big losses for the so-called subprime lenders who provided them with home loans and sending tremors through the Wall Street investors who bought those mortgages in high-risk pools. The manufacturing sector, with its big exposure to housing-related items such as appliances and carpets, also turned sluggish.

With those dynamics in place, investors and economists have been trying to guess whether the troubles in those sectors will spill into the broader economy, triggering a painful slowdown or even a full-blown recession.

But the latest data provide no evidence that the troubles in housing are moving out to contaminate the economy as a whole, and though a minority of Americans are under financial pressure from higher home payments, there is little to suggest that most consumers are cutting back on their spending.

In fact, wages are now strengthening at a pace that hasn't been seen since the go-go years of the late 1990s. In March, the average pay was $17.22 an hour, up 0.3 percent from February and up a very solid 4.0 percent over the past 12 months. Although accelerating wages make Fed inflation-fighters nervous, the trend also helps households keep spending.