It’s jobs day in America.
At 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its monthly report on the employment situation for December 2025, giving us the latest look at unemployment, job growth, and wages.
The report will wrap up a year of a job market marked by a “Great Freeze” in which companies haven’t been hiring very much, employees haven’t been switching jobs a ton, but large-scale layoffs that would mark a deeper downturn haven’t materialized yet either.
Check back here for updates leading up to and following the biggest job market data release of the month.
A tale of two partisan economic views
Right now, Democrats and Republicans have pretty different views of the economy — and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Democrats aren’t feeling too hot. Of course, some of that is to be expected with a change in control of the White House, but there’s a widening chasm in sentiment based on which party Americans align with.
Consumer sentiment among Democrats plunged since late 2024 and early 2025, according to data out of the University of Michigan’s surveys of consumer sentiment, while Republicans started to feel a whole lot better about the economy once they knew Trump was taking office again. In recent months, though, all parties have seen noticeable plunges in how they feel about economic conditions; there was a slight recovery across the different groups in December, perhaps linked to the end of a bruising federal shutdown.
But workers across the country and political spectrum are particularly worried about what might happen if they lose their jobs. In the most recent reading of the New York Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Expectations, workers said that, if they lost their jobs today, the average probability of finding a role in the next three months was 43.1%. That’s the lowest rate ever recorded since the New York Fed began tracking the measure.
The US job market has been frozen, but it could break by the end of 2026
Claudia Sahm, the chief economist of New Century Advisors, thinks the low-hire, low-fire state isn’t sustainable. She told Business Insider in December that she thinks the job market will go in one of two ways.
One way: “We really slow down in terms of hiring, and we hit a place where the bottom falls out. And it’s not just about slow hiring, it’s about firing workers and a recession.”
Second way: “The uncertainty lifts, they’re ready to pick up hiring, and you see things really stabilize and kind of look more like a labor market that we’ve been more used to in terms of the job opportunities and adding workers.”
Businesses have been skeptical about hiring or firing because of economic uncertainty, such as how tariffs would affect them and their consumers. Economists have also said businesses did a lot of hiring in the pandemic recovery period, so they might not have needed to add a lot more employees since then.
“At some point, if you want to grow as a company, you’re going to have to bring in more workers,” Sahm said.
Here’s how unemployment and job growth looked before the new report
The November report showed that unemployment reached 4.6%, the highest rate since September 2021. Unemployment has been at or above 4% since May 2024.
Meanwhile, the US added 64,000 jobs, largely due to the healthcare sector, which added 46,300 jobs. The construction sector added 28,000 jobs, and professional and business services added 12,000.
That report came late as a result of the government shutdown. Economists and others were excited to have November’s jobs report, even if it was published in mid-December rather than December 5 to allow for more time collecting and processing data.
The report included some info from the previous month as well. BLS was able to still calculate October job growth and other estimates from the establishment survey, a survey of businesses and government agencies, following the shutdown.
October unemployment, labor force participation, and other estimates that rely on the household survey won’t be able to be produced.
Today wraps up national job growth data for 2025
The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its employment situation report this morning. The new data can be used to analyze how the job market has evolved over the past year in comparison to previous years.
Economists described the 2025 job market as being stuck in a low-hire, low-fire state.
“Job growth has been very slow over the course of 2025, and it doesn’t seem like we’ve turned around quite yet to translate the pent-up demand for hiring and the recent increase in job openings into actual hires,” Nicole Bachaud, an economist at ZipRecruiter, told Business Insider after the last jobs report was published on December 16.
The new report will also feature annual revisions to the household survey, used to calculate the unemployment rate.
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