Layoffs This Year Reach Highest Levels Since Pandemic, According to One Measure

The government has been helping the spending cuts and economic uncertainty to push employers to laying the workers at the fastest speed since the epidemic.

The US-based employers have announced 696,309 job cuts so far this year, according to the monthly reports of the business and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. This is the highest level of job cuts as the epidemic-driven trimmed over the first five months of 2020 excluded more than 1.4 million people.

The pruning declared in May was actually lower than the April level, which was powered by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but was 47% higher than the job cuts announced in May 2024.

Andrew Challenger, senior vice president of Challenger, Gray and Christmas, said, “Tariffs, funding cuts, consumer expenses, and are putting intense pressure on employees of overall economic pessimism companies. The companies are spending less, recruiting, and sending notices.”

However, Dogge calculated more than one -third of the trimmed through direct cuts in the federal government employees and asked to cut jobs in funding or organizations to cut jobs as they lost government money.

The report has published job cuts announcements and recently reflects a string of major companies that report the trimming.

Proctor and Gambal (PG) was the latest company to declare trimmed, a company executive revealed this week that the group planned to cut 7,000 non-construction jobs in the next two years. Other recent pruning announcements have come from Microsoft (MSFT), Morgan Stanley (MS), Walmart (WMT) and Crowdastric (CRWD).

Because it only tracks published reports, most economists, analysts and investors do not follow it closely. Many people will look at the report of Friday’s official government jobs for more widespread measures to the labor market, as it collects direct information from businesses and workers.