Looking for a Trump bump in the economy? Keep waiting.

After two months of stellar job creation that convinced administration officials that President Trump’s policies were paying off immediately, employers pulled back sharply on hiring in March.

The economy added 98,000 jobs, the Labor Department reported Friday, fewer than half the monthly number for January and February.

The report contained some notable good news: The unemployment rate fell to 4.5 percent, the lowest level in almost a decade and a milestone in the long road back from the Great Recession. The rate was 4.7 percent in February. Wages also continued to rise.

But the disappointing number of new jobs was jarring for the administration, and well below what economists had expected. It comes as the stock market surge, which followed the November election, subsides and amid signs that economic growth in the year’s first quarter proves weak.

Economic perceptions, as well, may not be playing out in reality. Sentiment among consumers and businesses rose after Mr. Trump’s election, but so far, it has not been matched by a comparable increase in spending by either group.

“We’ve given up on waiting for hard data to improve,” said Rob Martin, an economist at Barclays. “It’s been five months since confidence increased. If consumption were going to improve, it would have already.”

Industries that Mr. Trump emphasized in his campaign — particularly manufacturing — continued to add jobs last month, but at a slower pace. Payrolls in the retail sector, meanwhile, declined further, shedding tens of thousands of jobs.

The response from the White House, which crowed last month after more than 200,000 jobs were produced in Mr. Trump’s first full month in office, was muted Friday.

Gary D. Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs executive who is director of the White House’s National Economic Council, emphasized the decline in the unemployment rate. “When you look at the jobs report as a whole, I think there’s an awful lot of good news in here,” he told Fox Business Network. Congressional Democrats took a dimmer view.

Also watching closely are the policy makers of the Federal Reserve, which has begun to reel in its post-recession stimulus. It raised interest rates last month and said it planned to do so twice more this year. But signs of a sluggish economy could affect how quickly the central bank moves.

“This raises the stakes for the April report,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist at MFR, a research firm. “You need to see things pick up in April, or else March won’t look like aberration.”

The market reaction, in any case, was sanguine, with stocks essentially flat for the day.

Barclays has said it expects the economy to actually slow in the first half of 2017, before rebounding modestly in the second half. “Given this data today, we see downside risk in our already soft expectations for the first half,” Mr. Martin said.

The consensus view on Wall Street is that the economy expanded at an annual rate of 1 percent last quarter, with the pace of growth in the current second quarter rising to 3.5 percent.

The March report represents a snapshot of the economy, not an oil painting. And snow and cold weather in many parts of the country clearly took a toll on the construction sector, which barely grew after gaining a total of more than 90,000 jobs in January and February.

“January and February were abnormally warm, so they were pumped up, and you had some payback in March exacerbated by the harsh weather,” Mr. Shapiro said.

On Capitol Hill, Republicans acknowledged a glass-half-full view of the report. “The economy clearly should be generating higher job growth,” said Representative Pat Tiberi, an Ohio Republican who is chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. “However, the unemployment rate fell to the lowest rate since before the recession.”

The top Democrat on the committee, Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, ignored the new jobless rate and focused instead on the disappointing payroll gain.

“Today’s jobs numbers show there are still challenges ahead that this administration must address,” Mr. Heinrich said. “President Trump promised that he would be ‘the greatest jobs producer that God ever created.’ Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee will hold him to this promise.”

Last month, when February’s payroll gain turned out to be much better than expected, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, claimed credit for Mr. Trump. Mr. Spicer called the job creation a result of “the surge in economic confidence and optimism that has been inspired since his election.”

Part of the problem for the administration is that its legislative accomplishments in the first hundred days are falling far short of the expectations — notably, for tax cuts and infrastructure spending — since the election.

Whether or not they support Mr. Trump, mainstream economists say it will take many months for policy shifts in Washington to move a battleship-like economy with 153 million workers.

What is more, the tepid numbers for March mask pockets of strength. For example, a few white-collar sectors like professional and business services are holding up well, adding 56,000 jobs last month.

Hyland, a business software designer in Westlake, Ohio, plans to hire at least 300 people this year, Bill Priemer, its chief executive, said. That is a 15 percent increase in head count at the company, and it is a sign of just how quickly demand is growing for new technologies like content management, one of Hyland’s specialties.

“We are growing faster than the economy and the enterprise software sector overall,” Mr. Priemer said. “Digital transformation is a big buzzword, but it’s just fancy terminology to describe how business can use technology to streamline their operations.”

On the other hand, new technologies are upending venerable industries like retailing, as consumers shift to shopping online and department stores close. The retail sector lost almost 30,000 jobs last month, after a decline of about 31,000 in February.

The headline numbers for hiring and the unemployment rate are derived from separate surveys by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one of establishments, the other of households. Although the two tends to converge over time, they can vary widely from month to month, and March was one of those times.

So while businesses showed an anemic gain of 98,000 jobs in terms of payrolls, households reported a 472,000 increase in employment, without any fall in labor participation. That explains why the unemployment rate could fall by 0.2 of a percentage point, even as the number for job creation was far short of expectations.

“I think the headline number was clearly impacted by the weather,” said Michelle Meyer, head of United States economics at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. But at some point she said, rosy economic expectations are likely to catch up with a more sober reality.

“Sentiment surveys moved sharply higher after the election on expectations of pro-business policies and tax reform,” she added. “So far, that hasn’t happened, and the big question is whether confidence can remain as strong.”