The US economy added 50,000 jobs in December, according to Labor Department data published Friday, amid broader concerns about the cooling job market as out-of-work Americans struggle to land roles.
The unemployment rate declined to 4.4%, from 4.5% in November. A Bloomberg survey of economists had estimated a median gain of 70,000 jobs and a 4.5% unemployment rate in the final jobs report for 2025.
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Revised data for November, meanwhile, showed a gain of 56,000 jobs rather than 64,000, the Labor Department said Friday, while revised data for October showed a loss of 173,000 jobs compared to the earlier reported decline of 105,000.
In all, monthly payroll growth for the year, including December’s data, averaged 49,000, Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said in a post on X.
“That’s the slowest annual growth outside of recessions,” Kolko said. “Immigration policy slowed workforce growth, which has held back job growth.”
Payrolls rose by a total of 584,000 in 2025, the Labor Department said, compared to the 2 million jobs added in 2024. And that meager growth — which has been driven by gains in healthcare and social services — is likely to be revised even lower, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told Yahoo Finance.
“For sure, when we get all the revisions, it will show outright job declines in 2025,” Zandi said.
Questions continue to swirl about the state of the US job market as economists and workers alike grapple with a weak hiring rate and paltry job gains, but relatively low layoffs in what’s been described as a “no-hire, no-fire” economy. Americans are already feeling burdened by it: Consumers’ “perceived probability” of quickly landing work within three months of losing a job hit a record low in December, according to a New York Fed survey.
Indeed, the share of people who have been without a job for 27 weeks or longer as a percentage of the unemployed population hit 26% in December, the highest since early 2022.
“You don’t want to become unemployed, because if you do, it’s very difficult to get back in,” Zandi said. “The duration of unemployment is now becoming quite long.”
The monthly jobs report, it’s worth noting, is only just getting back on track after last fall’s shutdown-induced delays.
But this week’s private data releases offered some slight reassurances in a landscape where market watchers are scrounging for any evidence of change. Layoff announcements for December, for example, amounted to the lowest monthly total since July 2024, according to the global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. And private payroll data from ADP showed a gain of 41,000 new positions for December.