The Labor Department is set to release employment data on Wednesday that will provide a first sign of whether job growth in 2026 will look any better than last year’s, which was the slowest since 2009 not counting the 2020 pandemic year.
A number of statistical quirks may influence the outcome. One has to do with a holiday season, during which retailers didn’t hire as many temporary workers as usual. That could have resulted in fewer layoffs in January, which translates into a stronger reading after the Bureau of Labor Statistics adjusts for typical seasonal fluctuations.
Another has to do with a change in the way the bureau estimates how many jobs were generated or destroyed by businesses that close and open each month. That’s expected to knock a few tens of thousands of jobs off the total.
And the whole report was delayed by several days after a short government shutdown, which came on the heels of a six-week shutdown that created a permanent gap in the household survey.
Data wrinkles aside, a number of conflicting indicators have made the labor market exceptionally difficult to assess in recent months.
Initial claims for unemployment insurance remained very low in January, suggesting that employers are not laying off more people than usual, but job openings dropped to their lowest point since September 2020. Private-sector measures from the payroll processor ADP and the job posting aggregator Revelio Labs showed very low and negative employment growth.
Most analysts don’t see the bottom falling out of the labor market. But there’s little to indicate an energetic rebound, either. The median economist polled by Bloomberg estimated that employers added 68,000 positions in January. That would be an improvement on the 15,000 jobs added on average over the previous six months.
“We still think that the labor market, though it’s softer than it was a year or two ago, is still holding up,” said Augustine Faucher, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group. “We’re going to see more of that kind of softer job growth that we saw in 2025, but not a significant slowing from that point.”
Lydia DePillis reports on the American economy for The Times. She has been a journalist since 2009, and can be reached at [email protected].
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