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.
The United States economy lost 41,000 jobs in October and November, and the unemployment rate has ticked up to its highest level since 2021 as the labour market cools amid ongoing economic uncertainty driven by tariffs and immigration policies. In November, the US economy added 64,000 jobs after shedding 105,000 in October, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics.