"Friday's December employment report - the last for 2025 - reinforced the biggest theme in the job market last year: It's a hard time to be looking for work, unless you're looking at a few select corners of the economy. "The job market is ending the year with a fizzle rather than a bang," Daniel Zhao, the chief economist at Glassdoor, said. In total, the US added just 584,000 jobs in 2025, a big drop from the past few years."
"It's a sign of how uneven the job market has become, and it shows why job searches have become so frustrating for many on the hunt. "There wasn't a single month in 2025 where we added as many jobs as we did on average in 2024," Laura Ullrich, the director of economic research in North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said. Here are the bright spots and darker areas of the long-frozen job market of 2025."
Overall US employment expanded by just 584,000 jobs in 2025, a marked slowdown from prior years. Growth concentrated in healthcare, social assistance, and leisure and hospitality, with healthcare accounting for roughly 69% of net gains and notable increases in ambulatory services, hospitals, and nursing and residential care. Federal employment and sectors such as government, professional and business services, and manufacturing experienced year-over-year job declines. The uneven pattern left many jobseekers facing limited opportunities outside a few industries. Labor-market conditions were weaker throughout 2025, though modest hiring increases could occur in 2026.
Read at Business Insider
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