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Pedestrians move along Lexington Avenue in the Manhattan borough of New York City on December 16, 2025.
People work in a restaurant in Manhattan on December 16, 2025 in New York City.<\/p>\n
Pedestrians move along Lexington Avenue in the Manhattan borough of New York City on December 16, 2025.
People work in a restaurant in Manhattan on December 16, 2025 in New York City.
(CNN) \u2014<\/strong> On Friday at 8:30 a.m. ET, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the latest snapshot on the health of the US labor market \u2013 and economists\u2019 estimates vary wildly over what we should expect for the final jobs report of 2025.
The consensus estimates are for 55,000 jobs to have been added in December, underscoring how last year\u2019s employment growth was the weakest in decades.
But some economists say seasonal factors such as the holiday hiring peak could put December\u2019s monthly total somewhere north of 105,000.
The unemployment rate is expected to tick down to 4.5% after hitting a four-year high of 4.6%<\/a> in November, FactSet consensus estimates show.
No matter what the numbers show, Americans are feeling increasingly hopeless about their employment prospects.
\u201cTotal job gains for 2025 are on track to be a meager 710,000,\u201d Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, said in a statement. \u201cThat\u2019s the worst hiring outside of a recession since 2003. Even 2010, on the heels of the Great Recession, was a better year for hiring than 2025.\u201d
The perceived probability of finding a job hit a record low of 43.1% in December, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York\u2019s latest Survey of Consumer Expectations, a closely watched survey that has been running since 2013.
Additionally, the December survey showed that respondents\u2019 expectations of losing their job rose to the highest mean probability since April 2025.
For much of the past 12 months, extremely high uncertainty (from sweeping policies such as those related to tariffs); dramatic shifts in the nation\u2019s immigration flows; and, to a much lesser extent, companies testing the AI waters, have resulted in muted employment gains \u2013 or even outright losses \u2013 across most industries.
The lone exceptions have been health care \u2013 an industry growing as a result of an aging population \u2013 and leisure and hospitality, which has reaped some of the spoils from an increasingly bifurcated economy.
\u201cHealth services is an expensive type of service for most consumers; leisure and hospitality [spending] is a discretionary service for all consumers,\u201d said Nela Richardson, chief economist at payroll company ADP. \u201cThese two sectors are consistent with a K-shaped economy<\/a> where higher-income consumers are driving spending.\u201d
Those two sectors, which make up about 22% of all employment, accounted for 84% of the total job gains seen from January through November 2025. And for the remaining 78%, it\u2019s been a far different story.
The labor market became even more lopsided after April 2025, when President Donald Trump made his biggest and broadest tariff announcement.<\/a> Sentiment plummeted and uncertainty skyrocketed, stifling hiring plans in the process. From April through November 2025, job gains in health care and leisure and hospitality outpaced the net jobs added across the entire labor market during those eight months.
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Pretty much every other industry is in the throes of a \u201chiring recession,\u201d Navy Federal Credit Union\u2019s Long said.
Data released earlier this week further confirmed the listless state of the broader labor market.
The BLS\u2019 latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey data released Wednesday showed that US businesses sought out fewer workers in November and hiring activity slumped to match its lowest rate in more than a decade (excluding the data- and economy-distorting pandemic).
At the same time, layoff activity remained low in November, along with the rate of people quitting their jobs.
A certain amount of turnover is needed for a healthy labor market and growing economy. But as it stands now, it\u2019s taking months for people to find work as the US jobs market is more like an \u201cexclusive club.\u201d<\/a>
Some economists believe, however, that a bottoming out of the labor market slowdown may be near.
Job cut announcements fell to a 17-month low in December, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas data released Thursday morning.
Employers announced plans for 35,553 layoffs last month, while hiring announcements were the highest for the month since 2022, Challenger noted.
\u201cThe year closed with the fewest announced layoff plans all year; while December is typically slow, this, coupled with higher hiring plans, is a positive sign after a year of high job-cutting plans,\u201d Andy Challenger, Challenger\u2019s chief revenue officer, said in a statement.
In a separate report, the latest unemployment claims data showed that around 208,000 people filed a first-time claim for unemployment benefits for the week that ended January 3, according to the Department of Labor.
Additionally, data from Bank of America showed there was no acceleration in unemployment payments in the bank\u2019s customer accounts in December.
\u201cWhile the labor market still is arguably in a low-hire or low-fire mode, it does look \u2013 in our data \u2013 as though the worst of the slowdown could be behind us,\u201d David Michael Tinsley, senior economist at Bank of America Institute, told reporters during a call on Wednesday.
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