Power Shift: Unemployed Workers Outnumber Open Jobs

After several years of job openings vastly outnumbering the number of unemployed people in the U.S., creating a job market in which workers could dictate terms, the balance of power has shifted back to employers. In December 2025, the number of jobseekers in the United States outnumbered job openings by almost one million - the largest gap since March 2021.

According to the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), the number of job openings dropped to 6.54 million in December 2025, which is the lowest number of unfilled positions since September 2020, when the U.S. economy was in turmoil due to the devastating impact of Covid-19. Meanwhile, there were 7.50 million unemployed people in the U.S. at the end of last year, which is back to levels last seen in late 2016 when not taking the pandemic years into account.

This means there are now 0.87 unfilled positions for every job seeker, indicating that the excess labor demand, identified by the Fed as one of the factors that drove inflation in 2022 and 2023, has disappeared and we're moving towards excess supply again. Before the pandemic hit in March 2020, there had been 1.2 job openings per unemployed person in an already tight labor market. That indicator then crashed to 0.2 by April 2020 amid mass layoffs in sectors affected by Covid restrictions before climbing as high as 2.02 job openings per unemployed person in March 2022, at the height of the "Great Resignation".