February jobs report: 2025 was a dismal 12 months for jobs

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The newest US jobs report got here out yesterday, and it paints a combined image. Within the Vox worker Slack, senior editor Benjy Sarlin defined it to us as a little bit of a “each/and” state of affairs: The very newest numbers, for final month, got here in increased than economists anticipated — and job development over the previous 12 months was dismal.

These simultaneous realities assist underscore the strangeness of our present financial second. Whereas the economic system is rising general, that prosperity isn’t felt by most odd folks. Hiring stays lackluster-to-fine, as this newest jobs report exhibits. Financial beneficial properties flow overwhelmingly to companies and shareholders, not staff. Affordability, in the meantime, ranks among most Individuals’ largest coverage issues.

On Tuesday, a putting new Gallup poll discovered that optimism has cratered to document lows amongst US adults: At the moment, 4 in 10 folks consider their life shall be worse in 5 years than it's now.

These diverging narratives — the pessimism and nervousness staff really feel, on one hand, and the top-line enlargement on the opposite — say quite a bit concerning the true state of the economic system below President Donald Trump. By the way, his administration is trumpeting the most recent jobs report as a “blockbuster, expectation-shattering” triumph. (We’ll get to that hyperbole in a second.)

In different information, my Vox colleagues are following the abrupt closure and reopening of the El Paso airport , which briefly and needlessly stoked fears that the US might provoke strikes in Mexico. We’re additionally watching the information out of British Columbia, the place 9 folks had been killed in a mass shooting on Tuesday, and out of Arizona, the place the search for Nancy Guthrie continues .

However this morning, let’s give attention to the most recent jobs report and what it tells us concerning the present, paradoxical financial second.

“Not a recession,” however not removed from it

The Bureau of Labor Statistics drops new jobs numbers every month, however the February report is the most important of the 12 months.

In that launch, the company not solely supplies month-to-month estimates for issues like job beneficial properties, common earnings, and unemployment, but additionally updates the entire previous 12 months’s numbers with extra complete, year-end information.

On each of these fronts, the roles report launched yesterday was a reasonably large deal. Economists have for months bemoaned the sorry state of hiring within the US.

In January, nevertheless, the US economic system added 130,000 jobs — not a “blockbuster” quantity, by historic requirements, however above economists’ (admittedly low) expectations.

On the identical time, the changes to final 12 months’s numbers made it clear that 2025 was a good worse 12 months for jobs than economists anticipated. It’s “not fairly a recession,” the economist Justin Wolfers said on Wednesday, “however not far above it.”

Over the course of your entire 12 months, the economic system added simply 181,000 positions — making it the worst 12 months for hiring, exterior a recession, since 2003. In January, June, August, and October of final 12 months, the US truly misplaced extra jobs than it gained.

That’s fairly wild, on condition that — based on different measures — the economic system is doing properly: The inventory market is at record highs , and development was very strong final quarter. Even amid that increase, nevertheless, most industries haven’t been hiring. In reality, the US would have misplaced jobs in 2025 if it weren’t for beneficial properties in well being care and associated fields, the place firms are all the time and without end hiring. (We’re not getting any youthful, as a nation!)

Even in January, when issues appeared to stabilize a bit, over 60 p.c of the job development got here from these sectors. In the meantime, the economic system misplaced tens of hundreds of jobs in monetary companies and authorities, as federal staff who took deferred resignations got here off the payroll final month.

As the economist Heather Long wrote for Vox earlier this month , three components assist clarify the so-called “jobless increase.” Understanding these components is vital to understanding not solely the previous 12 months, however the place the economic system is headed subsequent.

1. First, gradual hiring was a correction from 2022 and 2023. Firms went a bit overboard with hiring within the quick aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, when client exercise surged again to life and demand for staff was intense. However what goes up has to come back down, and enterprise leaders are “right-sizing” their employees by hiring extra slowly.

2. Trump’s dramatic (and erratic) coverage strikes precipitated some employers to pump the brakes. Trump slapped incoming items with the very best tariffs for the reason that Nineteen Thirties, creating widespread uncertainty that inspired some companies to cease hiring or lay off staff. The president additionally minimize down on authorized immigration and launched a mass deportation program, which has constrained the provision of obtainable staff in some fields. And his efforts to slash the dimensions of the federal workforce have been enormously profitable.

3. Some firms invested in AI over human staff. There isn’t a lot proof that AI is definitely changing jobs but, nevertheless it positively performs into companies’ hiring choices. Firms poured a ton of cash into AI and robots final 12 months, which suggests they invested much less cash in hiring precise people.

This final issue would possibly show particularly pertinent in 2026. As my colleague Eric Levitz noticed this morning, many technologists count on AI-related job displacement to intensify and accelerate with the appearance of agentic AI instruments like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. “There’s little query that agentic AI goes to reshape the white-collar economic system,” he wrote.

In different phrases, hiring might very properly have stabilized final month… and that stability might not final terribly lengthy. Think about it one other “each/and” state of affairs.