Central bankers have for months said that they were hearing anecdotal evidence that the job market had begun to slow down: The Fed’s recent Beige Book summaries of anecdotal reports from around the country have suggested that hiring was slight or even flat in parts of the country. But while hiring cooled somewhat last year, no big fissures have shown through to the actual data.

In fact, there are signs that the labor market is still very solid — something Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, acknowledged this week.

“We’ve had a very strong labor market, and we’ve had inflation coming down,” Mr. Powell said. “So I think whereas a year ago, we were thinking that we needed to see some softening in the economy, that hasn’t been the case. We look at stronger growth — we don’t look at it as a problem.”

Mr. Powell and his colleagues have suggested that the labor market has come back into balance as the supply of workers has recovered, something that has been helped along by a rebound in immigration and a recent jump in labor force participation. The number of job openings in the economy has slowly nudged down.

But few if any economists expected job gains to remain this robust at a time when higher interest rates were expected to meaningfully weigh down the economy. In fact, many forecasters were predicting an outright recession early last year.

The question for the Fed is what it means if the job market not only fails to slow down as anticipated, but actually accelerates again. While one month of data does not make a trend, officials are likely to keep an eye on strong hiring and wage growth.

Mr. Powell said this week that robust growth in and of itself would not worry the Fed — or necessarily prevent them from lowering interest rates this year — so long as inflation continued to come down. But central bankers could become more wary if solid wage gains and a booming economy help to keep consumers spending so much that it gives companies the wherewithal to keep raising prices.

“If there was a real concern that we were getting a re-acceleration, it might get them to pause a little bit,” said Kathy Bostjancic, the chief economist at Nationwide. But for now, “they’re more apt now to respond to a weakening in the labor market than to continued strength.”

The revisions were part of an annual process in which monthly estimates are reconciled with data collected by state agencies that is more accurate but less timely. They don’t change the big picture: Job growth has still slowed since the peak of the post-lockdown rehiring boom, but has remained resilient. But the updated data suggest that the slowdown has been even more gradual than previously believed.

The payroll estimates that the Labor Department releases each month — including the surprisingly strong January report on Friday morning — are based on a survey of about 122,000 employers. Each year, the government revises those estimates to bring them in line with more definitive data collected by states through their unemployment insurance systems.

The adjustments released on Friday incorporated state-level data through last March. Those figures showed that employment was actually lower, by 266,000 jobs, than previously reported, reflecting somewhat slower job growth in 2022.

But Labor Department statisticians also revised the more recent estimates, using what they learned from the state data to improve their models. Those adjustments showed job growth was stronger in 2023.

As in most years, this year’s revisions were relatively small: only about one-tenth of 1 percent of total employment. But revisions in some sectors were meaningful. Retailers added about 63,000 more jobs in 2023 than previously reported, and the leisure and hospitality sector added 92,000 more jobs than in earlier estimates.

Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, made it clear during his news conference on Wednesday that the central bank is not bent on keeping interest rates high just to slow down the labor market, but the report suggested that the economy might not be cooling quite as much as policymakers had expected.

Given that continued strength, the Fed is unlikely to feel pressure to cut interest rates at its next meeting on March 19-20. Policymakers do not want to hold borrowing costs too high for too long and risk a painful recession, but the data suggests that a possible downturn remains very much at bay. Instead of faltering, the job market is booming.

The central bank’s policy rate is now set to 5.25 to 5.5 percent, a level high enough that economists think it will cool the economy as it trickles through financial markets and weighs on mortgage, credit card and business borrowing.

The Fed’s goal in trying to cool the economy is to rein in inflation, and price increases have been receding: Over the past six months, inflation data have been close to normal.

But that has come without much of a broader economic slowdown. Job openings have come down and the housing market slowed in reaction to higher rates, but both hiring and consumer spending have remained surprisingly resilient.

Mr. Powell suggested this week that the Fed would like to see more evidence that inflation was coming under control before it begins to cut interest rates and that it was unlikely to have enough data to feel confident in that before the March meeting.

Markets sharply dialed back the chances of a rate cut at that gathering following the January jobs data.

Notably, Mr. Powell said that the Fed was willing to be patient — rather than wary and reactive — as it waits for wage growth to slow to normal levels. Some economists think that the relatively quick pace of wage gains could prevent inflation from stabilizing at 2 percent over time, if it were to continue.

“I think the labor market by many measures is at or near normal, but not totally back to normal,” Mr. Powell said. “Job openings are not quite back to where they were,” and wage increases “are not quite back to where they were.”

He added that wage increases “probably will take a couple of years to get all the way back, and that’s OK.”

Given Mr. Powell’s comments — and how much inflation had come down in recent months — Kathy Bostjancic, the chief economist at Nationwide, said that the Fed could still proceed with rate cuts this year even with a very strong labor market. She expects a move lower in May or June.

“It seems like inflation is the primary driver,” Ms. Bostjancic said, versus the strength in the fresh jobs numbers. “This should have a very modest impact on the timing — and even the degree — of rate cuts.”