President Donald Trump’s administration has hit a disturbing new economic milestone: For the first time since April 2021, the number of unemployed Americans has surpassed the stock of available jobs.
In July, there were 7.24 million job seekers and 7.18 million open positions, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. The number of open jobs had dropped from 7.4 million in June.
“This is yet another crack in the labor market that illustrates how much harder it is to get a new job right now than what we’ve seen in a long time,” wrote Heather Long, the chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union, on X.
She noted that while the final tally of jobs might be subject to revision, there was an observable and “straightforward” trend. In June and July the U.S. also experienced its lowest hiring rate since 2013, Long wrote in a separate post.
Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, said that the latest numbers signaled “softening labor market conditions.”
“The job openings-to-unemployed ratio fell below 1.0 for the first time since April 2021, signaling a loosening demand for workers,” she wrote in a statement.
Last month, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned that the economic slowdown was “much larger” than originally assessed in June, pointing to the revised July jobs report, which showed a stark contrast from the growth felt during the same period in 2024. He said the economy was suffering from decreased demand as well as decreased supply.
“This unusual situation suggests that downside risks to employment are rising. And if those risks materialize, they can do so quickly in the form of sharply higher layoffs and rising unemployment,” he said.
“This slowdown is much larger than assessed just a month ago, as the earlier figures for May and June were revised down substantially. But it does not appear that the slowdown in job growth has opened up a large margin of slack in the labor market—an outcome we want to avoid,” Powell said. Now it seems that “slack” may have started to appear.
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