Here are the winners and losers in the frozen US job market

• New employment data shows which sectors notched job growth and losses in 2025.
• Federal workers faced challenges, while the healthcare sector fueled job growth.
• Overall job growth was lower last year than in recent years, but hiring could pick up modestly in 2026.

Friday's December employment report — the last for 2025 — reinforced the biggest theme in the job market last year: It's a hard time to be looking for work, unless you're looking at a few select corners of the economy.

"The job market is ending the year with a fizzle rather than a bang," Daniel Zhao, the chief economist at Glassdoor, said.

In total, the US added just 584,000 jobs in 2025, a big drop from the past few years. Job growth has been unequal across the economy, as growth in just a few sectors masks the weakness undergirding the rest of the economy. For those in healthcare and social assistance, prospects had been rosy: The sectors added more than 700,000 jobs together in 2025. But it's more of a reckoning for those in government, professional and business services, and manufacturing. Those three sectors were among the ones that had fewer jobs than a year ago.

It's a sign of how uneven the job market has become, and it shows why job searches have become so frustrating for many on the hunt.

"There wasn't a single month in 2025 where we added as many jobs as we did on average in 2024," Laura Ullrich, the director of economic research in North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said.

Here are the bright spots and darker areas of the long-frozen job market of 2025.

The winners: Health care, social assistance, and leisure and hospitality

Healthcare continues to shine amid the general job market dreariness, holding strong throughout the year.

The healthcare sector accounted for 69% of the growth in 2025, with job growth of over 100,000 in ambulatory healthcare services, over 100,000 in hospitals, and about 84,000 in nursing and residential care facilities, reflecting that healthcare job growth hasn't been concentrated in just one area.

It's a sector that's likely to continue growing; in an August 2025 report, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projected that healthcare and social assistance would have both the largest job growth and the fastest growth rate out of all sectors. BLS chalked that up to the needs of an aging population and the rise of chronic conditions — all of which require more workers to take care of growing numbers of patients.

Leisure and hospitality also added a good number of roles, although that sector tends to have quite a bit of turnover. Social assistance, however, remains a key jobs engine: After recovering in 2022 from pandemic-related job loss, the sector didn't stop growing. Individual and family services added about 289,000 jobs in 2025.

While healthcare workers are still in demand, it might not be an easy job switch; many types of healthcare work require certain skills and years of education.

"It's not necessarily really easy for people to snap their fingers and switch from working in manufacturing to healthcare, for example," Ullrich previously told Business Insider.

The losers: Federal workers and professional and business services

The new report showed federal employment fell by 274,000 this past December from a year prior, which Zhao said meant the largest single-year drop since 1946, just after World War II. It's also comparable to the job loss in 1953, when the Korean War was winding down.

The federal government workforce weathered a lot of change in 2025: People were offered — and many ended up taking — a deferred resignation package to voluntarily leave their roles. At the same time, agencies like the Department of Education and the Small Business Administration moved to cut jobs, leading some workers to end up in employment limbo as the courts ruled on those layoffs, and others ultimately lost their roles.

"The president promised to right-size the federal government. What you saw is exactly that — a downsize of the federal government and a increase in private sector jobs," Department of Labor Deputy Secretary Keith Sonderling told Business Insider.

Meanwhile, some other white-collar sectors experienced job loss last year. The professional and business services sector lost 97,000 payrolls, with employment in temporary help services falling by 99,200. That loss in temporary help services isn't as large as it had been in the previous few years.

Ullrich said white-collar softness could be due to businesses shifting investments to AI as opposed to head count, economic uncertainty, and overhiring a few years ago, leading to less of a need for new employees.

Guy Berger, senior fellow at the Burning Glass Institute, said in a LinkedIn post that young people have carried most of the pain of a slow market. "And not just young people with college degrees — it's also high school grads and people with associate degrees," he said.

Job growth could be modest in 2026

Aaron Terrazas, an independent economist, expects this year to be a little bit easier for job searching, partly because employers won't be dealing with the uncertainty of what a new administration could bring.

"It's not that uncertainty has cleared up, but people are just having to make decisions because they have to be made," Terrazas said. "We're going to see more investment, more business plans being laid, and ultimately I think that will lead to some degree of more robust job creation."

Another bright spot: Berger told Business Insider said he doesn't think the newly released report indicates a recession is on the horizon and instead lowers the odds for one in the near term.

"The labor market has cooled a little over the past six months — mostly via weak hiring," Berger said.

Instead, the next year might just be slow and steady. "The job market, in some ways, is like someone recovering from a ski accident — eventually you get better, but you never quite get back fully to where you were before," Terrazas said.

Are you a job seeker with a story to share? Contact these reporters at jkaplan@businessinsider.com and mhoff@businessinsider.com.