The Market
Holiday hiring shrinks again
Challenger forecasts 450,000 seasonal retail jobs for Q4 2026, below last year's smallest holiday hiring gain since 2008. The season still has doors.
Hassan Abbas · September 25, 2026 · 2 min read
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The smallest season since 2008
Retailers added 461,500 seasonal jobs in the fourth quarter of 2025. That was the smallest holiday gain since 2008, and 15 percent below the 543,100 added in Q4 2024. The numbers come from Challenger, Gray and Christmas, whose 2026 holiday hiring outlook, published September 23, forecasts the season will shrink again: 450,000 retail jobs added in Q4 2026, by the firm's estimate.
Warehouses tell the same story. Transportation and warehousing employers added 266,500 seasonal positions in Q4 2025, down 12 percent from 2024 and the lowest fourth-quarter total since 2018, when 259,500 were added.
Why the on-ramp is narrowing
Andy Challenger of the firm points to a structural shift. Retailers are covering peak demand with automation, with the associates they already have, and with on-demand labor pools before they hire anyone new. He names still-high prices and tariffs working through supply chains as the pressure behind that caution. Demand itself has not collapsed. "Consumers are stretched but they are still showing up," Challenger said.
The broader market sends a mixed signal. According to Indeed Hiring Lab, its job postings index stood at 103.5 in mid-September, and year-over-year growth turned positive, at 0.7 percent, for the first time in almost four years. New postings still sit about 6 percent below their pre-pandemic level.
What the numbers can and cannot say
A forecast is not a count. Challenger is an outplacement firm, and its Q4 figures are its own analysis of non-seasonally-adjusted BLS data, not an official government series. Hiring announcements measure plans, not hires. Every number here deserves that caveat.
The doors that are open
Some are wide open. Spirit Halloween announced the largest seasonal hiring push in its history: 52,000 associates for a record 1,575 stores across the US and Canada. Michaels said on September 10 it plans to hire more than 10,000 seasonal team members, and noted that nearly half of last year's seasonal in-store roles converted to regular positions. The largest seasonal employers, including Amazon, Target and UPS, had not yet announced their 2026 numbers as of the Challenger report.
A shrinking season concentrates competition on the openings that do get posted. CoBlack keeps a search running against openings drawn from employer career pages and ATS feeds, so seasonal openings that reach the public sit in the same search as everything else.
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