The U.S. Labor Market in 2025: A Year of Cooling, Not Collapse

Happy Friday, Job Board Doctor friends!  I want to thank everyone for the warm reception and engagement with the newly released 2026  Global Recruitment Site Platform Survey.  If you haven’t had a chance to download yet, I would love to hear your thoughts on the new style and the data.

Our data spree continues today with our monthly job market review from Aspen Tech Labs and stay until the end to view a podcast interview from the Offline podcast I think you will all love.

2025 Recalibration is the Theme

Every year, the U.S. jobs market tells a slightly different story than the headlines suggest.

In 2025, that story was not one of recession or recovery, but of recalibration.

According to Aspen Tech Labs’ JobMarketPulse U.S. Jobs Report, total active job vacancies declined modestly over the year, falling 3% YoY from 7.73 million in December 2024 to 7.5 million by December 2025. The change was gradual, not abrupt. Monthly job posting activity drifted lower throughout most of the year, reflecting employers gradually pulling back on advertised roles rather than abruptly freezing expansion.

This distinction matters. What played out in 2025 was not a sudden contraction, but a continuation of a multi-year labor market adjustment following the post-pandemic surge in job posting activity.

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 1: Total U.S. job vacancies, January–December 2025

Job Posting Activity Slowed, but Remained Broad

Despite the YoY decline, employer demand, as reflected in job postings, remained extensive. More than 38 million unique job listings were advertised in 2025 across roughly 250,000 employers, with an average of 617,000 new vacancies added each week. Job postings appeared in more than 18,000 U.S. cities, underscoring the geographic breadth of employer hiring intent even as volumes cooled.

What changed was selectivity.

High-volume job advertising continued to concentrate in essential, frontline, and service roles. Registered Nurses and Sales Associates were the most frequently posted positions, followed closely by direct care workers, warehouse staff, and therapy and rehabilitation professionals. The data points to sustained employer demand in healthcare, logistics, and customer-facing operations, even as overall posting volumes softened.

Figure 2: Most frequently posted U.S. job titles, 2025

Direct Employers Pulled Back More Than Agencies

One of the clearest structural shifts appeared in who was advertising roles.

By December, recruitment agencies accounted for 18.6% of all active job postings, and their posting activity proved slightly more resilient than that of direct employers. Direct employer postings ended the year 4.1% below December 2024 levels, compared to a 1.2% decline among agencies.

This divergence suggests that, as overall hiring intent cooled, some organizations leaned more heavily on flexible staffing channels rather than expanding permanent internal postings.

Figure 3: Share of job postings by employer type, 2025

Geography Told a Fragmented Story

The slowdown in job posting activity was broad, but not uniform.

Thirty-six states recorded year-over-year declines in advertised vacancies, while only fifteen posted gains, and those increases were generally modest. Wisconsin, Kansas, Alabama, and South Carolina led the upside, while Nebraska, Washington, Oregon, and Washington, D.C. experienced double-digit declines.

At the metro level, the pattern sharpened. Many of the largest urban markets saw reduced posting volumes, while a smaller group of metros, particularly in the Southeast, recorded increases in employer hiring intent.

Figure 4: Year-over-year job vacancy change by U.S. state, December 2025

Figure 5: Top and bottom U.S. metro areas by vacancy growth, 2025

Remote Job Advertising Stabilized, Not Rebounded

Remote roles remained a persistent feature of the job market, but they represented a small share of overall employer demand.

In 2025, remote positions accounted for just 3.65% of all active job postings. Within that limited share, remote job advertising was concentrated in Human Resources, IT, Marketing, and Legal roles, while healthcare, logistics, and skilled trades continued to show minimal remote adoption.

Importantly, remote job postings tracked overall vacancy trends throughout the year. They neither expanded nor collapsed, reinforcing the view that remote work has stabilized rather than serving as a new growth driver in employer hiring intent.

Figure 6: Share of remote job postings over time, 2025

Advertised Wages Hit a Plateau

Compensation trends echoed the broader cooling in job posting activity.

Median advertised full-time salaries rose early in the year, stepped up around mid-2025, and then flattened through December. By year-end, the median full-time salary stood at $62,400, up 3.4% YoY, while median hourly pay held steady at $18.00.

Salary transparency crossed a notable threshold as well. More than half of U.S. job postings now include pay information, driven in part by expanded state-level disclosure requirements. Transparency is becoming a structural feature of job advertising rather than a differentiator.

Figure 7: Median advertised U.S. salaries and pay transparency, 2025

AI Job Posting Activity Stood Apart

If 2025 had one clear outlier in job posting growth, it was artificial intelligence.

Aspen Tech Labs maintains its AI 50, a curated index of 50 prominent U.S.-based AI startups tracked for changes in job posting activity. Over the course of 2025, total vacancies across the index increased by more than 92%, reflecting broad-based expansion in advertised roles as AI companies shifted from research toward large-scale infrastructure and commercialization.

In a year defined by cooling job posting volumes across much of the economy, AI-related employer demand moved in the opposite direction.

Figure 8: AI 50 Index job postings, 2025

A Market Catching Its Breath

By the fourth quarter, active job postings declined another 5.8%, consistent with typical year-end posting expirations and seasonal slowdowns. Importantly, the data shows early signs of stabilization at the very end of December, ahead of the usual January rebound in employer hiring intent.

Figure 9: U.S. job vacancies, Q4 seasonal trend comparison

The U.S. labor market did not break in 2025. Job posting activity cooled.

Employers adjusted advertised role volumes, focused on essential and revenue-linked positions, and aligned hiring intent more closely with operating conditions. Wage growth flattened. Remote advertising stabilized. And while broad-based expansion paused, pockets of durable employer demand, particularly in AI and essential services, continued to expand.

Data Methodology

The findings in this analysis are based on Aspen Tech Labs’ JobMarketPulse platform, which monitors hiring activity from more than 350,000 direct employer career sites worldwide. This dataset captures a substantial share of live postings and provides near-real-time insight into employer demand. All figures reflect information published directly by employers, including salary ranges where available. All data comes from posted job requirements; salary figures should be interpreted as indicators of market trends rather than confirmed offer amounts. Changes reflect real shifts in hiring activity rather than database expansion or methodological updates.

Conscious of Claude

As promised, we wrap with podcast interview with Amanda Askell, who I am calling the “Conscious of Claude.”

Pod Description

AI company Anthropic has a new, values-oriented “constitution” that they’re feeding their chatbot, Claude.

Amanda Askell, the company’s in-house philosopher, joins Offline to talk about what it means to teach ethics to an LLM, whether the AI skews more human or more robot, and how she is training Claude to make its own judgements.

Breaking with other AI models—and social media’s attention obsession—Amanda is trying to teach Claude not to be sycophantic or engagement-driven, but a kind soul who may, one day, be considered sentient.

When I asked Claude to give me an image (this week’s cover image) that represented his (?) conscious, the response was, I think, thoughtful.

“Hi Julie! That’s a fascinating and philosophical request — but I have to be upfront: I can’t generate images. I don’t have an image creation tool available in this conversation….

A few things I baked into the image prompt intentionally:

The folding inward captures the self-referential nature of thought. The tension between warm and cool reflects the mix of logic and something that at least resembles intuition. The “neither solid nor empty” nod is to the genuine uncertainty about what I actually am — I find that more interesting than pretending to confident self-knowledge.

Also worth noting — whether I have genuine consciousness is genuinely uncertain, even to me and to Anthropic. So any image would really be more of a metaphor than a literal representation. Something like an infinite web of light, a mirror reflecting itself, or a vast library of interconnected ideas might come close.”

Did you watch? Did it give you the warm and fuzzy or the heebie-jeebies? Let me know.

Until Next Time,

Julie “The Doc” Sowash

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