Private employers cut 13,500 jobs per week, monthly layoffs jump 175 percent, hiring slows to half last year’s pace, and unemployment rises to 4.4 percent. Credit application rejection rates are soaring

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The system is quietly trapping everyone while pretending nothing’s wrong.

We’re seeing a clear and data backed cooling in the US job market. Monthly layoff announcements have jumped sharply around 153,000 cuts announced in October, up about 175% from a year earlier. Formal layoff signals are rising and overall job growth has slowed to roughly 76,000 per month in 2025, less than half of 2024’s pace, while unemployment climbed to about 4.4%, the highest in nearly four years. In other words, hiring is slowing, layoffs are picking up.

We’re moving into what the Fed calls a low hire, low fire environment and that’s actually the key thing to understand. Not all companies aren’t doing mass layoffs but they’re clearly nervous about what’s ahead. So instead, they’re freezing open positions, doing replacement only hiring where they only fill roles when someone leaves, cutting hours instead of firing people and letting attrition handle the downsizing quietly. Job gains are getting concentrated in just a few sectors like healthcare and social services while construction, goods producing, and other areas are basically flat or losing jobs.

For workers looking for jobs, there are fewer openings and way more competition, especially if you’re not in the lucky healthcare or service sectors. For the economy, this is actually risky, if layoffs pick up even a little bit, unemployment could shoot up faster than normal since hiring is already weak. When people feel less secure about their jobs or can’t find work, they stop spending, which slows the whole economy down. Hence why the Fed will start cutting rates in December and into the next year.

Credit application rejection rates are soaring:

The overall rejection rate for US credit applications is up to 24.8% over the last 12 months, the highest since the data began in 2014, according to the NY Fed.

The rate has risen +10.4 percentage points since February 2020.

This comes as the rejection rate for mortgage refinances jumped to 45.7%, an all-time high.

At the same time, mortgage rejection rates hit 23.0%, the highest since 2015.

The rejection rate for auto loans reached 15.2%, the 2nd-highest on record.

Meanwhile, credit card rejection rates held steady at 21.2%.

Credit is becoming harder to access.