All around bad.

That’s an apt description of the trio of US labor market indicators on offer Thursday, when investors learned that the first month of the new year was defined by soaring layoffs and lackluster hiring. The highest initial jobless claims print since December was insult to injury.

By appearances anyway, US employers are about as confident in the outlook for the world’s largest economy in 2026 as investors are in the outlook for the world’s largest cryptocurrency, which is to say not at all confident.

“Generally, we see a high number of job cuts in the first quarter, but this is a high total for January,” Andy Challenger remarked on Thursday morning, editorializing around a remarkable surge in planned layoffs.

As the figure shows, Challenger counted 108,435 job cuts for last month, more than double January of 2025, more than triple December’s count and the highest for any January since 2009.

That suggests the stabilization observed late last year was a false optic. “Most of these plans were set at the end of 2025, signaling employers are less-than-optimistic about the outlook for 2026,” the editorial accompanying the release said.

Even more ominous on some levels, hiring plans totaled just 5,306 for January. That’s a sharp deceleration from December, it’s the lowest since August and, remarkably, it’s the fewest announced hiring plans for any January on record.

There’s the chart. It ain’t pretty. The previous record January low was 5,376.

Meanwhile, Revelio Labs’ effort to produce an alternative version of the BLS’s nonfarm payrolls report suggested the US economy lost jobs in January for only the second time since 2020.

As a quick (and obligatory) reminder, the Revelio release utilizes individual-level data from more than 100 million online professional profiles. It’s an admirable effort, but I can’t testify to the reliability of the output, which is subject to a lot of revisions.

(“And what, exactly, is any better or different about the BLS and ADP data?” Revelio might retort, indignantly. To which I’d have to say, “Touché, Revelio.”)

Thursday’s Revelio headline reflected a net job loss of 13,272 for January. The figure below includes all of the revisions that accompanied the release.

Only education and health services added a meaningful number of jobs last month, according to the report.

The breakdown was roughly consistent with Wednesday’s ADP release, which was similarly underwhelming and showed that were it not for health care, private hiring would’ve been negative to the tune of 52,000 at the beginning of the year.

All of the above would’ve been inauspicious enough on its own, but just in case, initial claims for the week to January 31 jumped 22,000 to 231,000, above every estimate.

As the figure shows, the week-to-week increase was the fifth largest since the summer of 2023.

Of course, 231,000 isn’t high in any historical sense, but it’s the most in two months and it suggests something may be stirring, as it were. The four-week average for the initial filers print hit a five-week high.

All in all, this was a foreboding round of labor market data. As BMO’s Ian Lyngen put it, in characteristically diplomatic fashion, “the combination of claims, Challenger, Revelio, and Wednesday’s ADP print has shifted the tone in the market and dimmed expectations” for next week’s delayed BLS payrolls print.