Jobs website Glassdoor warned of “forever layoffs” in mid-November, as a small drip-drip-drip of cuts throughout the year flew under the radar of most newspaper headlines while instilling fear throughout white-collar ranks. Now the recruitment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas has added a crucial bit of insight and one big number: 1.1 million. That’s how many layoffs have been announced year to date, only the sixth time since 1993 that threshold has been breached. With the notable and understandable exception of the pandemic year of 2020, you have to go back to 2009 to find a year with greater layoffs, and that was in the very depths of the Great Recession.

Technology remains the hardest-hit private sector industry, with more than 150,000 job cuts announced so far this year as firms continue to reset headcount after the boom years while they increasingly lean into automation. Telecom providers, food companies, services firms, retailers, nonprofits, and media organizations are all shedding workers as well, in many cases at double- or triple-digit percentage increases over last year.

Specifically, U.S.-based employers announced 1,170,821 job cuts in the first 11 months of 2025, up 54% from the same period in 2024. That makes 2025 one of only six years since 1993 in which announced layoffs through November have topped 1.1 million, putting it in the company of 2001, 2002, 2003, 2009, and the pandemic shock of 2020. November alone saw 71,321 cuts, the highest for that month since 2022 and well above typical pre-pandemic November levels.

Daniel Zhao, chief economist for Glassdoor, noted in an interview with Fortune that this actually understates the typical, true number of layoffs, citing federal data from the JOLTS survey that roughly 1.7 million people had been laid off over the same period. “The interesting thing that we saw in our research is that the shape of these layoffs is changing,” he said. “So instead of these large one-off layoffs, we’re seeing rolling layoffs and even some smaller layoffs as well.”

The “rolling layoff” must be considered amid the many conflicting signals of the economy of 2025, when “affordability” politics emerged to reflect mass unrest among vulnerable workers. Fears of a bubble in artificial intelligence have coincided with worker anxiety and Gen Z despair over an elevated unemployment rate and a dearth of entry-level positions.

Earnings reports increasingly reveal, as many executives call it, a “bifurcated” or “K-shaped” economy, used to describe the different trajectories of rich and poor. The wealthier cohort is spending freely, with the upper 10% accounting for nearly 50% of consumer spending (and absorbing elevated costs passed through from tariffs), while the lower-income consumer shows increasing signs of strain. Morgan Stanley analyst Mike Wilson believes a “rolling recession” was tearing through different sectors of the economy and that, from April onward, a “rolling recovery” has been underway in 2025.

Analysts at both Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Research have noted that this recovery is a financial one, reflected in stock prices and soaring profits—and increasingly in fewer workers required in white-collar positions. The era of “jobless growth” and process over people is emerging into view, thanks to the forever layoff.

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