A wave of layoffs swept across industries in 2024, with job cuts hitting a 15-year high, excluding pandemic year 2020.
American employers announced 761,671 job cuts in 2024, a figure that marks the highest annual total in 15 years, excluding the pandemic-driven layoffs of 2020, according to a new report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The report also shows that hiring intentions have slowed to their lowest level in nearly a decade, reflecting greater employer caution and uncertainty about the future.
The
report, released on Jan. 9, paints a picture of a job landscape in 2024 that faced mounting challenges throughout the year, which was marked by high borrowing costs, a prolonged slump in U.S. manufacturing, and the
highest number of corporate bankruptcies in more than a decade.
“Companies underwent extraordinary change in 2024 due to rapid technological advancement and shifting economic conditions,“ Andrew Challenger, senior vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in a statement. ”Most employers are anticipating additional uncertainty with the upcoming administration, which is leading to slower hiring and more layoffs in the short term from various sectors.”
Consumer optimism
soared in the wake of the November 2024 presidential election, possibly fueled by President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to both kick the economy into higher gear with a pro-growth deregulatory agenda and to
stamp out inflation by lowering energy costs and fixing lingering supply-chain snarls. However, confidence
pulled back in December 2024, driven by a significant revival of fears about worsening income and labor market conditions over the next six months, a period spanning the tail end of the Biden presidency and the first months of the incoming Trump administration, some of whose specific policy contours remain unclear.
Unemployment anxiety was also evident in the latest government
report on job vacancies and related metrics, which shows the quits rate falling to its lowest since 2020. A high quits rate signals that workers are voluntarily leaving their employers, confident in their ability to find a better-paying job elsewhere. A low quits rate suggests the opposite: more people clinging to their current jobs out of concern about labor market health.
The 2024 figure of 760,000-plus job cuts represents a 15 percent increase from the 2023 total of 665,775 reductions, per the Challenger, Gray & Christmas report. The data also show a decline in hiring intentions.
“The slower hiring pace reflects ongoing uncertainty in economic conditions and cautious approaches by employers to expansion,” Challenger said.
While some industries expanded their workforces in recent months—particularly in health care and hospitality—according to both
government and
private-sector data, the overall annual hiring intentions trend outlined by the Challenger report underscores concerns about economic headwinds heading into 2025.
Even though consumer spending—a key driver of the U.S. economy—has held up solidly, several recent reports suggest waning consumer demand, especially when it comes to discretionary goods.
“Despite the new tide of optimism, consumers across income levels and generations said they plan to keep their spending habits relatively subdued, particularly in discretionary and luxury categories,” according to a recent McKinsey
report.
A Bain & Co.
report recently described U.S. consumers as being in a “healthy spending posture” in the final weeks of 2024 but signaled a slowdown heading into 2025.
The greatest number of corporate bankruptcies in 2024 were in the consumer discretionary and industrial sectors, according to a recent
report from S&P Global Market Intelligence, which shows that the total number of bankruptcy filings last year was the highest since 2010, during the aftermath of the great financial crisis of 2008–2009, surpassing even the highs during the pandemic.
