The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that U.S. employers added 181,000 jobs last year, far fewer than the 1.46 million jobs that were added in 2024.
The U.S. economy experienced almost zero job growth in 2025, according to revised federal data. On a more encouraging note: Hiring has picked up in 2026.
Preliminary data had indicated that the U.S. economy added 584,000 jobs last year. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised that number after it received additional state data and found that the labor market had added 181,000 jobs in all of 2025.
This is far fewer than the 1.46 million jobs that were added in 2024.
Uh huh, hey, why don’t these job numbers reports ever talk about whether these new jobs are keeping up with the cost of living? Seems like it’d be important to discern how many jobs are paying minimum wage and how many are paying enough to actually afford to survive longer than the next 24 fucking hours. Oh, and how many of these new jobs are union jobs that protect worker’s rights? Pretty fucking important bits of information to just never ever report…
You’d get closer to that answer with a different report. Probably a combination of the Occupation Finder data showing wage ranges and the Employment Projections data which shows employment increase in number of jobs or declines in each sector.
The BLS used to be a gold standard for fantastic data collection, analysis, and sharing. However, I am not putting much confidence behind any data coming out of the trump administration.
That’s a very good point.
An “Income From Work” report would show far better how most people are being impacted.
A quick proxy could be overall wage increases for the year. I’m sure average wages for new jobs may be findable somewhere, but BLS recently released this:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/eci.pdf
From BLS report USDL-26-0184 on Feb 10, 2026.
Thanks. And fair enough, I’m just feeling sore about the state of things lately I guess. Wages and workers rights could always be way better in the US imo, so whenever these jobs reports come out, I get cynical. Sometimes unnecessarily so.
Cynicism is warranted. If you also look at inflation/CPI, it held pretty firmly at 2.7% for the year. That puts a 3.3-3.4% increase in salaries and benefits in a bit more perspective. I’m not even sure that 2.7% figure is very realistic. The way they measure CPI is pretty outdated. There are a lot of services we consider necessary now that aren’t covered, and those things have been going up a lot in recent years. Just as an example, my cell carrier bill went up 14% last year. I’m looking at other options, but it’s just one example of a service provider that either increased prices or watered down their product to try and squeeze more profit out of us in recent years.