US economy added 50,000 jobs in December, capping off one of the weakest years of job gains in decades

(CNN) — Hiring slowed more than expected in December, a sluggish end to what was one of the weakest years of job growth in decades, a dynamic that further amplified America’s affordability crisis.

The US economy added an estimated 50,000 jobs last month, slowing from a downwardly revised 56,000 jobs added in November, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Friday.

Still, the unemployment rate edged lower to 4.4% from a revised 4.5% in November.

Economists were expecting a net gain of 55,000 jobs in December and an unemployment rate of 4.5%, according to FactSet consensus estimates.

With December’s estimated job gains, which are subject to revision, the US economy added just 584,000 jobs last year. Outside of recession years, that’s the weakest annual job growth seen since 2003, BLS data shows.

And those meager gains were driven almost entirely by a couple of industries.

“The United States is in a jobless boom,” Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, said in an interview with CNN. “There was almost no hiring in 2025 … we would be talking about job losses in 2025, if it weren’t for health care and social assistance.”

Unemployment becoming a ‘permanent state’

In addition to the tepid gains recorded for December, October and November’s payroll estimates were revised lower by a combined 76,000 jobs.

Even still, the meager pace of employment growth is actually even weaker than the December report shows – something that will become clearer in the January jobs report.

That’s when the BLS will release the results of its annual benchmarking process that squares up the more real-time survey-drawn monthly estimates with the heavily lagged (but more accurate) payroll figures from employers’ quarterly tax filings. The preliminary estimate, released in August, was that 911,000 fewer jobs were likely added for the year ended in March 2025.

“With these revisions, the story of payroll employment in 2025 will convert, ex post facto, from ‘snail-like growth’ to ‘recessionary-like conditions,’” Brian Bethune, a financial economist and professor at Boston College, wrote in commentary on Friday.

This low-hire, low-fire labor market has resulted in more people on the outside looking in. In December, the share of people who were unemployed for 27 weeks or more rose to 26%.

That indicates “unemployment is increasingly becoming a permanent state rather than a temporary transition,” Nicole Bachaud, ZipRecruiter’s labor economist, wrote in a note on Friday.

Still, Friday’s report did have a couple of bright spots, which included stronger-than-expected wage gains. Average hourly earnings rose 0.3% for the month and picked up to 3.8% for the year – a modest gain over inflation.

A deep hiring chill since April

The labor market was already slowing, heading into 2025, as it continued to normalize following the seismic economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.

However, the gradual cooling turned sharply into a freeze by the spring. About 85% of the year’s job gains occurred in the first four months of the year, Long noted.

In April, President Donald Trump made his “Liberation Day” announcement of a massive suite of broad and steep tariffs on many of the goods imported into the country.

That and other dramatic policy shifts sent uncertainty surging higher and tossed an ice bath on sentiment in the process.

Tariffs, and the uncertainty surrounding them, were one of three big factors that contributed to the “hiring recession” that engulfed pretty much all industries last year, Long said in an interview with CNN.

In addition to tariffs, jobs continued to be scaled back in industries that over-hired during the pandemic. Additionally, the rise of artificial intelligence played a role as well, she said.

“What happened with AI is firms needed to use their cash to invest in AI, and so they pulled back on hiring in order to free up that cash,” she said. “It wasn’t so much like, ‘I’m going to use the robot to replace the human.’ It was, ‘I need the dollars to go to tech investment instead of human investment.’”

What resulted were muted employment gains – or even outright losses –across most industries.

The lone exceptions were health care – an industry growing as a result of an aging population – and leisure and hospitality, which has reaped some of the spoils from an increasingly bifurcated economy, where well-heeled Americans see continued wealth gains while a larger share of middle- and lower-income households are experiencing increased strain.

That was again indeed the case in December.

Leisure and hospitality businesses saw net job gains of 47,000, while health care and social assistance added 38,500 jobs, BLS data showed. Jobs were shed across goods-producing businesses, particularly those in manufacturing, as well as retail trade (where seasonal hiring wasn’t as flush as in years past)