Is December a bad time to job hunt? What the hiring data shows, plus a 6-week holiday plan

Month-by-month BLS and Indeed data on what happens to hiring from November to January, which weeks are really dead, and a week-by-week plan anchored to Christmas.

Most advice on job hunting in December comes in two flavours. One says nobody hires in December, so rest and start again in January. The other says December is secretly the best month, because everyone else gave up. Neither usually shows you a number.

We pulled the raw monthly data instead: US hires and job openings from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, daily job postings from Indeed Hiring Lab for the US and the UK, and the UK vacancy survey from the ONS. The answer is more precise than "slow" or "great". December is slower, the slowdown is concentrated in about two weeks, and the jobs that were open in November mostly stay open. The plan at the end is built around those two weeks.

The jobs don't disappear in December. New postings pause.

There are two different things people mean by "hiring slows". One is the number of jobs open at any moment. The other is the number of new jobs being posted. In December they move very differently.

Month	US hires (BLS)	US job openings (BLS)	US new postings (Indeed)	US postings online (Indeed)
October	106	108	100	101
November	91	94	95	100
December	73	90	83	98
January	96	100	92	95
February	83	95	102	97

Each figure is the month's level as a share of that year's monthly average (100 = an average month), averaged over 2006 to 2025 for BLS and 2021 to 2025 for Indeed. All four series are not seasonally adjusted. "New postings" are ads that have been on Indeed for 7 days or fewer; "postings online" are all ads live on Indeed.

Read the last column first. The stock of job ads online in December sits about 2% below an average month. The jobs posted in October and November are still up, still taking applications. What drops is the flow of new ads (17% below average) and, most of all, the number of people actually hired.

-27%

lowest month in 19 of 20 years

US employers hire about 27% fewer people in December than in an average month of the same year. December was the lowest month for hires every year from 2006 to 2025 except 2021, when it came second.

Source: BLS JOLTS, total nonfarm hires, not seasonally adjusted (series JTU000000000000000HIL), 2006–2025. Our calculation.

December has 21 to 23 weekdays, about the same as an average month, so this is not a short-month effect. Two things stand behind it. JOLTS counts a hire when the person joins the payroll, so an offer accepted in mid-December with a January start counts as a January hire. And the last week of the year is close to empty.

Openings fall less, about 10% below average, and they were the lowest month in 12 of the 20 years. Part of that dip is timing: BLS counts openings on the last business day of the month, which for December is the week between Christmas and New Year. That is also why Indeed's count of live ads, taken every day, barely moves.

So "is December a bad time to look for a job?" gets two answers. For starting a job, yes: December is the slowest month of the year for hires. For applying and interviewing, most of the month is close to normal. The next section shows exactly which days are not.

The dead zone is about two weeks long

Indeed Hiring Lab publishes its postings index every day, which lets you see the holiday dip at the scale of days instead of months. We compared new postings in each holiday season with the same year's first half of November.

Point in the season	US new postings (vs early November)	UK new postings (vs early November)
Week ending 15 December	89–96%	76–82%
Week ending 24 December	79–91%	70–77%
Low point, week ending 1 to 4 January	54–63%	36–40%
Week ending 7 January	70–76%	47–65%
Week ending 15 January	102–120%	96–107%

Ranges cover the 2020–21 to 2025–26 seasons. The two UK December rows leave out 2020, when November itself was depressed by lockdown. Indeed's index is a 7-day trailing average, so "week ending 1 January" means 26 December to 1 January.

Three things stand out.

The first half of December is close to normal in the US. New postings in the week to 15 December ran at 89% to 96% of early November in every season we measured.
The collapse is the week between Christmas and New Year. New US postings fall to 54–63% of their early-November level, and to under 40% in the UK.
Recovery takes until the second week of January. In the US, the 7-day average got back to its early-November level between 11 and 13 January in all six seasons. The first days of January are still slow; the second week is not.

The UK slows earlier and harder. By mid-December, UK new postings are already about a fifth below early November. The ONS vacancy survey points the same way: across its single-month estimates, December is the lowest month for UK vacancies from 2016 to 2025, about 7% below an average month. The ONS itself warns that those single-month figures are volatile, so treat that as a direction, not a precise size.

Why some articles say December and January look the same

A few guides cite JOLTS hiring rates and conclude that December hires look almost like January's. They are almost certainly quoting the headline figures, which are seasonally adjusted. Seasonal adjustment removes the usual December dip on purpose, so economists can see whether the labour market is getting better or worse beneath the calendar. It is the right number for the economy and the wrong one for your calendar.

To know what December feels like to a job seeker, you need the not-seasonally-adjusted series used above. In those, December hires are the lowest of the year, and January hires jump back by about 30%.

Office jobs and retail jobs run on different calendars

The total hides two opposite patterns. Here is December and January hiring by industry, as a share of each industry's average month (BLS JOLTS, not seasonally adjusted, 2016–2025):

Industry	October	November	December	January
Information	116	94	69	111
Financial activities	108	81	72	112
Professional and business services	106	88	78	105
Private education and health	110	83	75	105
Manufacturing	102	82	68	104
Retail trade	118	115	76	82
Leisure and hospitality	95	80	71	84
Government	92	77	61	96

In office-type industries (information, financial activities, professional services), January hiring runs 5% to 12% above an average month, right after the December low. That is where the offers made in November and December turn into start dates. Retail is the reverse: it hires for the season in October and November, and January is one of its weakest months.

So if you want an office job, the December slowdown is mostly a delay: the pipeline you build in November and December turns into January start dates. If you are applying in retail, the seasonal hiring happens in October and November, and it is mostly over by mid-December.

What we could not confirm

Four claims appear in nearly every article on this topic. We looked for primary data behind each.

"Budgets reset in January." True for companies whose fiscal year follows the calendar, and the January jump in office-industry hires fits it. Many large employers run a different fiscal year, though, and we found no dataset on when hiring budgets are approved. Treat it as likely for some employers, not a rule.
"There are fewer candidates in December, so less competition." Plausible, but we found no public data on applicant volume by month. None of the articles that repeat it cite any.
"Companies rush to use the rest of their budget before year end." We found no source for this either.
"Decision-makers are on holiday." The postings data supports this for the last week of December and the first days of January, and much less for the rest of the month.

The question comes up all the time on Reddit and Blind. In the Blind threads we read, the stories match the data more closely than the guides do. Interview loops that start before mid-December often finish, sometimes with an offer just before Christmas. Loops that start after mid-December tend to stall until the first or second week of January.

The 6-week holiday plan

The plan starts four weeks before Christmas, around US Thanksgiving, and ends with the first working week of January. The weeks are counted from 25 December, so it works in any year.

Week	What the data shows	What to do
1. Four weeks before Christmas	New postings close to normal	Apply at full pace. Every interview you start now can finish before the break.
2. Three weeks before	Still close to normal in the US; UK slowing	Keep applying. In interviews, ask what the timeline looks like around the holidays.
3. Two weeks before	US new postings about 90% of early November	Follow up on anything older than 7 to 10 working days. It is the last week most recruiters answer.
4. The week before Christmas	New postings drop; interviews get hard to book	Apply to the postings that are still up. Write to people you met this year, with no request attached.
5. Christmas to New Year's Day	The low point: US new postings at 54–63%	Do not send follow-ups. Update your resume, list target companies, draft January's messages.
6. First working week of January	Recovering, still about 70–76% in the US	Send the drafted follow-ups from the second working day. Apply to what was posted over the break.

Weeks 1 to 3: finish what can finish

These three weeks carry the most weight. In the US, new postings are still close to their November level, and interviews that start now have time to reach a decision before the break.

Two habits help. When a recruiter schedules a call, ask directly: "What does the process look like between now and January?" The answer tells you whether to push for a slot before 20 December or to plan for January. And in week 3, send the follow-ups that are due. Once the break starts, your email waits behind two weeks of others. Our guide to follow-up emails after no response has the timing and the templates.

Week 4: apply, and warm up your network

The number of new postings starts to fall, but the stock of open ads is still near its peak. Keep applying to what is up: those ads are still live.

This is also the week where a short message costs nothing and reads as normal. Write to former colleagues, a recruiter who liked you earlier in the year, someone you met at an event. A "happy holidays, here is what I am looking for in the new year" message, with no request attached, is easier to answer than a cold ask in January.

Week 5: prepare, don't send

The week between Christmas and New Year is the one time the data says "stop". An application sent on 28 December gets read by nobody until January, and by then it sits under a pile.

Use the week for the work that makes January faster:

update your resume and tailor a version for each type of role you target;
list 15 to 20 companies you want to work for, with a name to contact at each;
write the follow-ups you will send in January, and set the date each one should go out.

Week 6: restart, but don't expect full speed

The first working days of January are still slow: new postings only reach their early-November level in the second week. Do not send everything on 2 January. Start the follow-ups on the second working day, spread them over the week, and apply to the postings that went up over the break before the January rush fills them.

If you date follow-ups with a formula, remember that a plain working-day count treats Christmas Day as a working day. The tracker template's holiday tab fixes that.

Keeping the January restart in one place

The hardest part of this plan is week 6. By then you have follow-ups to send, people to reply to and new postings to apply to, and all of it was decided two weeks earlier.

The HiredFolio job application tracker keeps that list for you. Save a job from LinkedIn, Indeed or a company careers page with the Chrome extension, set a follow-up date on it for early January, and you get an email the morning it is due. The people you wrote to in week 4 go in your contacts, with their own follow-up date, and they show up in the same morning email.

Track your applications in HiredFolio

About the data

Every figure above is our own calculation from public, not-seasonally-adjusted data, through December 2025, retrieved on 28 September 2026:

US hires and openings. BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, series JTU000000000000000HIL (hires) and JTU000000000000000JOL (openings), 2006–2025, and the industry series JTU510000000000000HIL, JTU510099000000000HIL, JTU540099000000000HIL, JTU600000000000000HIL, JTU300000000000000HIL, JTU440000000000000HIL, JTU700000000000000HIL and JTU900000000000000HIL, 2016–2025. BLS JOLTS data.
US and UK postings. Indeed Hiring Lab job postings index (CC BY 4.0), not-seasonally-adjusted index, total and new postings, 2021–2025 for the monthly figures and the 2020–21 to 2025–26 seasons for the daily ones.
UK vacancies. ONS X06, single-month vacancy estimates, not seasonally adjusted, all vacancies, 2016–2025.

Method: for each year, divide each month's value by that year's average month, then average those ratios across years. A result of 73 means 27% below an average month. The daily comparisons divide each date's 7-day average by the average of 1 to 15 November of the same year.

Key takeaways for this December

Apply at full pace until mid-December: new postings are still close to normal, and interviews started now can finish before the break.

Send nothing between Christmas and New Year. Draft your January follow-ups and date them instead.

Restart on the second working day of January and expect full speed only in the second week.

Before the break, check your timing with the follow-up email guide and its templates.