December job openings lowest in five years

By Morgan Sweeney
The Center Square

Despite several quarters of strong GDP growth, job openings continued trending downward in December to an estimated 6.5 million – the lowest number in five years and about 1 million less than a year ago.

The total number of hirings was equal to the total number of job separations (whether voluntary, involuntary, permanent or temporary) and both remained little changed from November, at 5.3 million each.

The numbers reflected in the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey shouldn’t have come as a surprise though, according to Bruce Yandle, distinguished adjunct fellow for the free-market-oriented Mercatus Center.

“The JOLTS report, especially on new job openings, was much weaker than expected, but in a sense, we should have expected a weak report,” Yandle told The Center Square. “The economy on the employment front has been sort of dead in the water for a year.”

Over the course of 2025, unemployment rose from 4% to 4.4%, inflation declined in the first half of the year but climbed back up in the second half and the job openings rate fell from 4.7% to 3.9%.

“What we’re seeing is a continuation of the ‘no-hire, no-fire’ labor market dynamic,” said Revana Sharfuddin, a research fellow at Mercatus, in a statement to The Center Square. “Hiring demand and job-finding probabilities have cooled markedly, even as layoffs haven’t surged.”

More positions opened up in construction in 2025, as job openings either remained stagnant or declined in nearly every other industry.

“That dynamic can push unemployment up slowly without the headline shock of mass layoffs,” Sharfuddin added.

Payroll processing company ADP released its jobs data for January on Wednesday, with a total growth of 22,000 jobs in the private sector. Were it not for health care, there may have been an overall decline. Health care continuously added jobs in 2025 while other industries have lagged.

“In a lackluster month for hiring, health care was a standout, adding 74,000 jobs,” the report reads. “Leading the slowdown was manufacturing, which has lost jobs every month since March 2024, professional and business services, and large employers.”

Yandle did not sound optimistic about what to expect in the coming months, accounting for Winter Storm Fern and other events he said are affecting economic activity.

“There’s no telling what we’re going to see when we see the [government] data on January and February because of the interruptions we’ve had,” Yandle said.