Layoff and hiring rates have been low for months. That may be starting to change, and not in a good way.
Job cuts announced last month hit their highest January total since 2009, according to a report released Thursday by global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. This is in line with a growing trend of jobs being trimmed across the country.
Challenger’s report, which is based on company announcements of job cuts, showed that U.S.-based employers announced 108,435 job cuts last month, marking an increase of 118% from the 49,795 cuts announced in January 2025, and a 205% increase from the 35,553 job cuts announced in December.
The report also noted last month saw the lowest January hiring level since 2009. The official January jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics comes out next week after a delay due to the brief government shutdown. The previous BLS report showed U.S. job openings dropped to a five-year low in December.
Experts say the broader picture on jobs is still relatively strong when considering metrics like unemployment rates. But that picture doesn’t reflect how people are feeling in the job market, and Challenger’s findings may indicate broader problems in job growth.
The stagnant job market is seeing an uptick in layoffs without a corresponding uptick in hiring. So even though layoff numbers are near pre-Covid levels, according to Glassdoor chief economist Daniel Zhao, workers fear losing their jobs because sluggish hiring might make it more difficult to find another.
“Worker anxiety about layoffs is clearly high, even if it’s not trending 1-to-1 with the hard data,” Zhao says.
The year kicked off with a few high-profile mass layoff announcements. Amazon last Wednesday announced its biggest-ever round of layoffs, affecting 16,000 workers, on top of another 14,000 it laid off in October. UPS announced it’s planning up to 30,000 operational cuts this year as it expects to handle fewer deliveries for Amazon, its largest customer.
While the surge in layoff announcements is “attention-grabbing,” says Zhao, “the data suggests the increase in layoffs has been more subdued.”
The unemployment rate remains in the 4% range, which is considered healthy, but it has inched up over 2025 and hit a four-year high of 4.6% in November. As for job growth, nonfarm payrolls fell significantly in October, the third time in six months they were net negative, but came in slightly better than expected in November.
In the midst of this hiring picture, job seekers and workers are feeling uncertain; worker confidence in the ability to find another job fell to a record low of 44.9% in September.
Despite the high-profile cuts, “the probability of losing your job has not gone up all that much,” says Laura Ullrich, Director of Economic Research in North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab. Many of the layoffs, she said, are currently concentrated at companies that over hired, are making large AI investments or both. Amazon and UPS together account for over 40% of the January cut announcements in the Challenger report.
Layoffs in tech and logistics follow big booms in business in those sectors during the pandemic, when many of those companies in turn ramped up hiring. “Some of this is still about a correction from that period of time,” Ullrich says.
Those sectors could be better described as “low-hire, some-fire,” she says, but the overall macroenvironment remains low-hire, low-fire.
The bigger numbers, like those in recent company announcements, also don’t necessarily reflect the details of an employer’s plan. “It’s not unusual to get forward-looking statements in the first month of the year from companies as they wrap up their previous fiscal year,” Zhao says. Some of the companies, like UPS, “are talking about planned job cuts over the course of the year or plans to cut headcount via attrition, which are not all the same as a more typical layoff,” he notes.
Many workers have nevertheless been feeling stuck in their jobs because of low hiring and fear of layoffs.
“Even though the unemployment rate might be at a relatively healthy number and people are employed at a relatively healthy level, that doesn’t mean people have to be happy about the job they’re in,” Zhao says.
Low job seeker confidence and continued low hiring rates could be driving people to keep job-hugging. “People are holding on because they do feel this confusion,” Ullrich says. “There’s a lot of uncertainty.”
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