Last year saw the most layoff announcements since 2020

If last year’s news cycle felt like a nonstop barrage of corporate layoff announcements, that’s because it was.

Employers announced over 1,200,000 job cuts in 2025, up 58% from 2024, when 761,000 layoffs were disclosed, according to an analysis from outplacement services firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. That’s also the highest level seen since 2020, when some 2,300,000 cuts were announced.

March marked the highest month for layoff announcements last year, at around 250,000, followed by February with more than 172,000 cuts, HR Brew previously reported. December saw the fewest announcements, with just 35,553 cuts announced, while employers announced plans to hire more than 10,000 roles, an increase from past Decembers and a positive sign, according to the firm.

“The year closed with the fewest announced layoff plans all year. While December is typically slow, this coupled with higher hiring plans, is a positive sign after a year of high job cutting plans,” Andy Challenger, the firm’s workplace expert and chief revenue officer, said in the press release.

Government saw the highest total job cut announcements in 2025, at more than 308,000, most of which were in the federal government. By comparison, only 38,000 job cuts were announced in that sector in 2024. The short-lived yet destructive Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) accounted for over 293,000 job cut announcements, the “leading reason” for 2025’s overall layoff announcements, which impacted both federal workers and contractors, according to Challenger’s analysis.

In the private sector, technology companies made the most layoff announcements, totaling more than 155,000 last year, up 15% from 2024. That was followed by warehousing, which announced 95,317 job cuts in 2025, and retail, at just under 93,000. The top reasons cited in announcements, after DOGE cuts, were store, department, or unit closures, market and economic conditions, and restructuring.

Zoom out. Challenger, Gray and Christmas’s monthly layoffs tracker is frequently cited in business news coverage about the state of the labor market. That said, experts have warned that Challenger’s data, which tracks layoff announcements, not job cuts themselves, is not a fully reliable source for measuring the current state of the labor market.

“I know there’s a lot of appetite for doomerish content about the economy and labor market, but I recommend caution when it comes to layoff announcements. They’re a small, unrepresentative sample of actual layoffs,” Guy Berger, a labor economist and senior fellow at the Burning Glass Institute, wrote on LinkedIn.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly labor turnover data, employers made around 1.7 million layoffs and firings in November 2025, the lowest rate seen in six months. (Data for December won’t be released until early next month.) Overall, layoffs and discharges, and initial jobless claims, increased slightly in 2025 compared to recent years, but still remain historically low, MarketWatch reported this month.

Make no mistake, though, the labor market is definitely cooling: Employers added 584,000 total jobs in 2025, down significantly from the 2 million gain seen in 2024, according to the BLS’s monthly jobs report.