A Cup of JOE
Is the Job Opening Stability of 2025 Over?
Marissa Hashizume, NLx Research Hub Economist
December 10, 2025
This year, job openings were finally flattening out after a steady decline over the past few years. The decline started back in 2022 after the post-COVID peak in job openings that is associated with the “Great Resignation.” From January 2023 (10.7M openings) through the end of 2024 (7.5M openings), there was an average of approximately 140k fewer job openings each month. This year, the average drop in monthly openings was only around 15k through October, showing a mostly flat trend. Fluctuations around the 7.5M mark were minimal with the highest job opening count at around 7.7M at the beginning of this year and the lowest at 7.4M in July.
However, November saw a precipitous drop in job openings (240k drop to 7.2M) that appears to have broken the flat and stable trend of the earlier part of this year. November drops are not uncommon – the 3.2% reduction this year was the same from October to November last year and there was a similar 2.5% reduction in 2023. The difference in the past few years is that these drops have been in line with decreases in other months whereas this year, the other months have been relatively stable. It is possible things will pull back up in January as has happened in the past few years, and then the question will be what comes after. Regardless, November job openings did not maintain the stability that we saw for the first time this year since the pandemic.
Job openings in all four U.S. regions have followed similar patterns over the past few years, from the steady decline in 2023 and 2024, to the leveling off in 2025, to the drop last month. The West saw the largest decline in monthly job openings since January 2023 with a 39% drop (1.5M last month) compared to 31% in the Midwest (1.6M), 30% in the South (2.9M), and 29% in the Northeast (1.3M). All four regions had job opening drops of around 3% from October to November this year, which were, again, similar to recent years but unusual in the context of this year.
While all regions of the U.S. are in the same boat with the sudden drop in openings in November, a single month of data does not make or break a trend. It will be important to closely follow job openings in the coming months to see if 2025 was an anomalously stable year or if November was an anomalously bad month for job openings.
***A Cup of JOE uses job opening estimates from the NLx Job Opening Estimator (NLx JOE). Explore more job opening numbers, see methodology notes, and more on NLx JOE, updated with new estimates monthly.***
