Job growth hits 20-year low in Trump’s first year

San José, CA – The annual updating of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS, a division of the Department of Labor) of the job creation numbers cut the annual number by 403,000 new jobs. This meant that only 181,000 net new jobs were created for the year, or only about 15,000 new jobs per month. This is the lowest annual number outside of a recession year since 2003, when the U.S. economy was in what was then named a “jobless recovery” after the 2001 recession.

For all his boasting about the “world’s greatest economy,” Trump’s first year in office pales behind 2024, in the last year of the Biden administration, when more than 750,000 jobs were created, more than 60,000 a month, four times the 2025 figure. What did boom in 2025 was the stock market, with the broad index of the S&P 500 up by almost 18% that year. But half of all stocks are owned by the top 1% of billionaires and mega millionaires, while the bottom 50% of the population who have to work for a living only own 1% of all stocks.

This update on the labor market actually brings the official jobs numbers more in line with other, more negative measures of how working people are doing. Consumer sentiment surveys have cratered, the University of Michigan index going from 71.7 in January to only 52.9 in December. This reading was lower than the low numbers during the past recessions going back to 1980, when working people were hit by the “double whammy” of high inflation (the Consumer Price Index or CPI rose more than 14% that year) and high unemployment (of almost 8%). The Consumer Sentiment Index bottomed out at 51.7 that year.

The economic struggle of working people could also be seen in the rising rate of borrowers falling behind on paying their loans. The delinquency rate on household loans rose to 4.8% in the last three months of 2024, the highest since 2017. This increase was driven by more and more home buyers falling behind on their mortgages and former college students falling behind on their student loan payments. Low income and younger borrowers were hit especially hard.

Another sign of consumers feeling economic stress is the latest report on retail sales in December 2025, which came in with no change. While this report is adjusted for seasonal factors, such as seasonal holiday shopping, it is not adjusted for inflation. So flat retail sales would mean fewer, but higher priced items are being sold.

Last but not least, the corporate-owned mainstream media focused on the January 2026 jobs numbers that came out in the same report. The report was better than expected, with 130,000 net new jobs, more than twice what economists expected, and the unemployment rate dropped a bit to 4.3%. However these monthly reports are revised three times, and the changes in the January numbers have been especially large. For example, the first report on January 2025 job creation that came out in February 2025 was 143,000 net new jobs created. But the final numbers just out show a loss of 48,000 jobs, or 183,000 fewer jobs than first reported. If a similar revision were to happen in February of 2027, it would wipe out all the new jobs in January 2026 and push the report to a net loss of about 50,000.

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