JOLTS Preview (December)
How did hiring close out the year?
As of this publication, key BLS reports are being delayed due to the (probably brief) government shutdown. The House is expected to vote on government funding tomorrow. So my bet is that the JOLTS data will come out late this week or early next week (instead of Tuesday morning).
Also, I know we’ve all been worried about potential tampering with government statistics since the prior (excellent) BLS Commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, was fired. But the new nominee, Brett Matsumoto, is a great and well-regarded choice. So at least on this front, data wonks can breath a sigh of relief.
Now onto December JOLTS…
TL;DR: Hiring probably finished the year a little lower than it started.
More below chart.
Hiring has been weak for a long time. But for about a year, from the summer of 2024 through the summer of 2025, it was also stable. It was a very hard time to find a job, but didn’t get any harder. Then, in the summer of 2025, there was a slight turn for the worse, and lots of people worried it was the first step of another leg down.
So far, that leg down has been small. It also shows very tentative signs of being the last step as well as the first step (though we haven’t had anywhere near enough data for this to be conclusive). This is to, me, the most important question about the December JOLTS report: is the small post-summer decline in hiring “one and done”? Are we headed for an extended (albeit slow) sequence of hiring declines (a la 2022-mid 2024) or are we just going to stabilize at these slightly lower levels?
The 2nd most important question is whether layoffs were a little on the high side. The surge in layoff announcements last fall is consistent with a small (not large) increase, and we saw signs of it in October (but not November). We’ve seen several periods of slightly higher layoffs several times in the past few years - in late 2022 and early 2023, then again in in late 2024 and early 2025.
In case you are interested in what will happen to hiring and layoffs going forward, you may find my 2026 labor market preview useful. I think layoffs won’t do much, but hiring will be a little lower by the end of the year.