Employers added 50,000 jobs to the US labour force last month, amid uncertainty over the strength and direction of the world’s largest economy, according to data released Friday by the Labor Department.
The unemployment rate, which rose to a four-year high of 4.6% in November, was down to 4.4% in December.
The closely watched reading was shy of the approximately 55,000 jobs economists expected to be added in the US economy for the month, according to consensus estimates.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said both employment and the jobless rate “changed little” in December.
For much of the past 12 months, the only sectors to have added jobs in the aggregate are health care and leisure and hospitality, according to CNN.
Hiring slowed down
According to BLS data, 2025 was the weakest year of employment growth outside of recession years since 2003.
The labour market, which was already slowing heading into 2025, cooled sharply as hiring stalled out across most industries, a pullback economists attributed to high uncertainty (in part due to massive shifts in trade and immigration policy) as well as stubborn inflation and high interest rates, according to CNN.
Which industries showed an uptick in job growth?
According to Business Insider, leisure and hospitality had strong job growth over the month. Employment in leisure and hospitality increased by 47,000 from November to December, and employment in healthcare increased by 21,100. Employment fell by 25,000 in retail trade and by 11,000 in construction.
More part time jobs over full-time ones
Nearly a million more people who wanted full-time jobs ended up working part-time this year. According to the BLS, this includes people whose hours were reduced or who couldn’t find full-time work.
In total, around 5.3 million people fell into this bucket; around 3.4 million were in that position due to slack work or business conditions, and around 1.5 million were only able to find part-time roles.
What else did the data show?
Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men stood at 3.9%, for adult women it stood at 3.9%, for teenagers at 15.7%, for Whites at 3.8% and Blacks at 7.5%. Unemployment rates for Asians stood at 3.6%, and Hispanics at 4.9%, BLS data showed.
The number of people jobless less than 5 weeks edged down to 2.3 million in December. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) changed little over the month at 1.9 million but is up by 397,000 over the year. The long-term unemployed accounted for 26% of all unemployed people in December.