The first “clean” (that probably needs more scare quotes) read on the US labor market in months showed the world’s largest economy added fewer jobs than expected at the end of 2025.

December hiring was 50,000 all told, the BLS said Friday, well short of the 70,000 consensus and down from November’s tally, which was revised lower to reflect a 56,000 addition.

October’s headline, which was impacted heavily by the realization of job cuts tied to Donald Trump’s deferred resignation program for federal government employees, was marked down sharply and now shows a 168,000-job loss, the largest since December of 2020.

Incorporating the revisions, the three-month average has now spent three straight months in negative territory, but that’s purely a function of the October drag.

Notably, private payrolls missed by a mile, printing a mere 37,000 gain for December, less than half the consensus forecast. (Thank goodness for local government hiring!)

By sector, the jobs were in restaurants, bars, health care and social assistance, predictable and consistent with the December ADP report.

The household survey was revised in this release to reflect the end-of-year update to the seasonal adjustment factors for the national labor force series. As a result, November’s multi-year high jobless rate (4.6%) was adjusted lower, to 4.5%. In December, the unemployment rate was 4.4%. The participation rate ticked lower to 62.4%.

As a reminder: We’re never going to know what the unemployment rate was for October, nor the participation rate. The BLS on Friday said December’s household survey was unaffected by any legacy issues from the shutdown.

The data comes on the heels of similarly so-so readouts from ADP and Revelio, both of which suggested hiring was generally stable at a low level late last year.

“There are concerns that there could still be lingering noise associated with the government shutdown as well as broader data-collection angst [but] the fact that the private data indicate a rebound in job creation as well will surely add credibility to any stronger-than-expected update from the BLS,” BMO’s Ian Lyngen remarked, just prior to the BLS release.

The figures weren’t “stronger-than-expected,” but they were ok under the circumstances, and it speaks volumes that alternative measures are now being used as a credibility check on the government data rather than the other way around.

“We’re certainly onboard with the notion that hiring picked up in the last month[s] of 2025, but extrapolating the trend through 2026 strikes us as overly optimistic,” Lyngen went on. “After all, the administration continues changing the rules.”

For the full year, nonfarm payrolls rose 584,000 in 2025, nowhere close to the prior year’s 2 million advance. This week’s Challenger report showed 2025 was the worst year for job cuts since the financial crisis (excluding 2020), while hiring plans were the lowest since at least 2017.