The state of the American labor market will be back in focus on Friday, when the federal government releases hiring and employment data for the month of December.
The monthly jobs report will provide the latest in a rapid series of economic updates after several releases were delayed or canceled because of the federal government shutdown. Those recent glimpses into the state of the economy, including November jobs data published three weeks ago, have demonstrated resilient growth and spending but some softness in the labor market.
The job market has become harshly cold over the past year for new graduates and others looking for work. And yet, nearly every week, data on new jobless claims across all 50 states has shown that firings remain low.
The persistent reduction in job openings and the increase in the long-term unemployed over the past year “suggest the weakest labor market since mid-2017,” said Ernie Tedeschi, the chief economist at Stripe, a financial tech firm, who worked for the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the Biden administration.
“The labor market was certainly not recessionary in 2017 and not even bad, but it was meaningfully looser than what we later experienced,” he said, during the tight, worker-friendly labor market just before the pandemic.
Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said he expected data revisions coming from the government early this year would show that initial estimates of hiring last year were “substantially overstating job growth at least through the first half of 2025.”
Even amid concerns about labor market weakness, the latest numbers on overall growth remain strong. Gross domestic product, the standard measure of total economic activity, grew at a 4.3 percent annualized pace in the third quarter and productivity (business output per employee) grew by 4.9 percent.
Most analysts expect that this momentum moderated in the last three months of 2025. But they still expect that growth in the $30 trillion U.S. economy will register a respectable pace in 2026 — above 2 percent — even as serious concerns about housing affordability and the general cost of living persist.
For the December jobs report, economists surveyed by Bloomberg expect a payroll gain of approximately 60,000 jobs, compared with 64,000 in November. They expect the unemployment rate to have ticked down, by a tenth of a percentage point compared with November, to 4.5 percent.
Talmon Joseph Smith is a Times economics reporter, based in New York.
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