The hits just keep comin’.

Shortly after a trio of private-sector updates cast a pall over the outlook for the US labor market in the new year, the reopened BLS said job openings fell a third straight month in December to the lowest since September of 2020.

The JOLTS report, released on a slight delay due to another (mercifully fleeting) US government shutdown, reflected just 6.542 million open positions on the last business day of 2025.

As the figure shows, openings have fallen by 1.12 million since September, a reflection of… I don’t know, nothing good, let’s just put it that way.

Do note: Consensus expected 7.25 million from the JOLTS headline. So this was a very large miss. A quick look at the breakdown shows a significant fall in professional and business services vacancies.

Excluding April and May of 2020 (for obvious reasons), openings in the professional and business services category are now the lowest since December of 2017.

I don’t know if that’s AI-related, but it certainly suggests waning demand for human service providers to businesses. That category includes employees in law, accounting and consulting as well as administrative and support services.

Panning quickly back out, overall layoffs moved slightly higher in the release, but remain generally subdued, underscoring the by-now-clichéd “low hiring, low firing” narrative.

The figure below shows you the jobs-to-jobless ratio, which the Fed used to watch like a hawk but now may need to observe with a dovish eye.

At just 0.87, that metric’s the lowest since March of 2021, right before inflation took off and the economy began to overheat in earnest.

Coming full circle, the headline openings print was short of every economist estimate.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.