California job losses slow in January as cuts surge nationwide

Job cuts surged nationwide in January following large layoffs, but California’s losses slowed after a year in which it led the nation in staff reductions.

U.S. employers announced 108,435 cuts in January, more than twice the 49,795 during the same month last year — and triple the 35,553 announced in December, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

The January totals were the highest for the month since 2009, when the financial crisis was ongoing. They included 30,000 cuts by UPS as it winds down ties with Amazon, and 16,000 cuts by the online retail giant itself, which closed retail stores and thinned management ranks.

“Generally, we see a high number of job cuts in the first quarter, but this is a high total for January,” said Andy Challenger, an executive at the outplacement firm.

U.S. employers last month announced plans to hire just 5,306 workers, the lowest total for the month, Challenger said, since it began tracking hiring plans in 2009. In December, employers said they planned to hire 10,496 workers.

Tariffs and persistent inflation have been cited by economists as a drag on the economy.

The massive California economy, by contrast, saw employers announce only 8,286 job cuts in January. That was nearly a third fewer than the same month last year, when the state was battered by disruption in tech and entertainment.

Thousands of workers were laid off in 2025 at Intel, Salesforce, Meta, Paramount, Walt Disney Co. and elsewhere. Apple even pushed through a rare round of cuts — though the bloodletting slowed by the end of the year.

California led all states last year with 175,761 job losses. The state was surpassed only by Washington, D.C., where about 300,000 federal workers lost jobs following the efforts by the Trump administration to trim the workforce in the name of efficiency.

The 2025 layoffs pushed California’s unemployment rate up three-tenths of a percentage point to 5.6% during the year before it fell to 5.5% in December, the latest available figure. There were just 2,739 job cuts announced the last month of the year, typically a slow time for layoffs before they pick up in the new year.

In January, Georgia led the nation with 31,415 announced layoffs, as Michigan and Washington topped 19,000. California trailed in fourth place.

The January job cuts by U.S. employers contribute to a less-than-stellar jobs picture, even as the national unemployment rate dipped a tenth of a point to 4.4% in December. The nation added only 50,000 jobs that month, down from 56,000 in November.

Despite the job losses, the economy has continued to grow — at an annual rate of 4.4% in the third quarter — driven by strong retail spending and buoyed by hundreds of billions of tech spending on artificial intelligence.

However, consumer sentiment is below where it was during the 2007-09 financial crisis as the unemployed struggle to find work. That gave rise last year to the expression that the nation is in a “no hire, no fire” economy — before layoffs began picking up.