February Layoffs Fell Sharply. Hiring Plans Fell Even More.
But the same report tracks something else: hiring plans. And those came in at just 18,061 for the year so far, down 56% from the same period in 2025.
That gap tells you everything you need to know about where the job market stands right now. Companies have largely stopped cutting, but they’re not replacing the positions they lose either. Workers leave through attrition, and those seats stay empty. Andy Challenger summed it up well, pointing to geopolitical uncertainty, cost pressures, and end-of-quarter caution keeping employers in a holding pattern. That holding pattern, as Pete Newsome noted on today’s episode, has been the defining story of the labor market for well over a year.
Year-to-date cuts sit at 156,742, the fifth-highest January-February total since 2009. The hardest-hit sectors include transportation (up 872% year over year), industrial manufacturing (up 143%), education (up 96%), and technology (up 51%). AI was cited as the reason for 4,680 cuts in February alone, about 10% of the monthly total, and 12,304 cuts so far in 2026.
A Record Revenue Year Didn’t Stop Morgan Stanley From Cutting 2,500 Jobs
Morgan Stanley laid off approximately 2,500 employees this week, about 3% of its global workforce, across all three of its divisions: investment banking and trading, wealth management, and investment management. Financial advisors were not among those affected.
What makes the announcement notable isn’t the size. It’s the timing. Morgan Stanley’s 2025 was a record revenue year. Q4 beat estimates, and investment banking revenues were up 47%. This is not a company in distress making difficult decisions. Reuters reported the cuts were driven by strategy and individual performance, and the bank says it intends to add headcount in other areas.
Sound familiar? It should. This follows almost exactly the same pattern we saw from Block last week, a company generating billions in profit that nonetheless cut 40% of its workforce. Whether or not Morgan Stanley explicitly cited AI as a factor, a profitable year no longer means your job is safe. Companies are making workforce decisions based on where they’re going, not just how they’re performing today. That’s a meaningful shift, and anyone working at a large organization right now should be paying attention.
Revelio’s February Data Shows the U.S. Economy Actually Lost Jobs
While ADP reported 63,000 private-sector jobs added in February, Revelio Labs’ independent workforce data tells a different story: the U.S. economy shed approximately 16,600 jobs last month. Both numbers can be accurate simultaneously because they measure different things, but the contrast is worth understanding before Friday’s BLS report.
The sector breakdown from Revelio is telling. Retail trade and leisure and hospitality dragged the numbers down, with Amazon, CVS, Starbucks, and McDonald’s among the biggest individual decliners. On the other side, healthcare and financial services held up: HCA Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, PwC, and HCL all added jobs in February.
That divide is becoming a pattern. Professional services and healthcare keep gaining while consumer-facing and blue-collar sectors keep losing. It’s not a single-month anomaly.
The broader hiring picture from Revelio is equally sobering. The current hiring rate sits at 21.7% of the total workforce, well below the 30%-plus pace of 2021 and 2022. Attrition is running at 22.7%, meaning more people are leaving jobs than starting them, which explains the net loss. Active job postings came in at 16.79 million, down nearly 10% from a year ago. New job posting salaries also ticked down 1.4% from January, a rare and notable decline. Revelio described the labor market as operating near “stall speed” on hiring, which is about as precise a summary as you’ll find.
If you manage hiring for your organization and you’re watching these trends, the future of recruiting looks increasingly dependent on identifying the right talent quickly rather than waiting for an open market to do the work for you. Talk to our team about how to stay ahead of it.
Weekly Jobless Claims Hold Steady at 213,000
The Department of Labor’s weekly jobless claims report, also out this morning, came in at 213,000 for the week ending February 28, unchanged from the prior week and running slightly below where it was a year ago.
The consistency here is actually meaningful context for everything else in today’s reports. People are keeping the jobs they have. The stress in the labor market isn’t mass layoffs; it’s the absence of new opportunities. Fewer openings, lower hiring rates, and now declining salary offers on new postings. Employers aren’t panicking; they’re just not growing.
Staffing your team doesn’t have to be hard.
Reach out and see how we can help.
Frequently Asked Questions
U.S. employers announced 48,307 job cuts in February 2026, down 55% from January and 72% from the same month in 2025. However, hiring plans for the year so far are down 56% compared to last year, pointing to a labor market where cuts have slowed but new job creation has stalled.
Morgan Stanley cut approximately 2,500 employees, about 3% of its workforce, citing strategic decisions and individual performance rather than financial hardship. The bank had a record revenue year in 2025, with Q4 results beating estimates and investment banking revenues up 47%. The move reflects a broader trend of profitable companies restructuring based on future direction rather than current performance.
Depending on the data source, the picture is mixed. ADP reported 63,000 private-sector jobs added, while Revelio Labs’ independent workforce data shows a net loss of approximately 16,600 jobs. Both figures can be accurate because they use different methodologies and data sources. The BLS jobs report, released the following morning, provides the most widely cited official count.
Healthcare and financial services are among the stronger sectors, with companies like HCA Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs adding jobs in February. Retail trade, leisure and hospitality, and technology are seeing continued losses. Transportation has seen the most dramatic year-over-year increase in announced cuts, up 872% so far in 2026.
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February’s Challenger Report: The good number and the one that matters more
Welcome back to Cornering the Job Market. Today’s headlines include another major employer announcing job cuts despite having a record revenue year. Also, three labor market reports came out. They measure different things, but share a common message about where things stand right now. But first, the Challenger Job Cut Report came out for February. On the surface, it’s good news. Layoffs dropped sharply last month. Always a great thing to see. But buried in the same report is hiring plans, which tell an entirely different story. So, first the job cuts. There were 48,307, which is down 55% from January. That is outstanding.
And it’s even better because it’s down 72% from this time last year. However, hiring plans were also announced in this report, and those were at 18,000, just over 18,000, which is down 56% from the same period last year. And so that perfectly describes the dynamic that we’ve been seeing that I’ve been reporting about for weeks now, maybe months. Companies have stopped cutting it to a significant degree, but they’re not replacing positions either. So they’re losing people and not replacing them. So that is not good at all for the job market. And pretty much everything I’m going to talk about today is really in line with that, other than the big one big cut that we did see. Now, year-to-date cuts are 156,742, and those ranked the fifth highest for any January, February time period since 2009. The hardest hit sectors were transportation. The cuts were up 70, 872%. That is a massive number.
Also, industrial manufacturing is up, education cuts were up 96%, and technology cuts were up 51%. Andy Challenger said geopolitical uncertainty, cost pressures, and end-of-quarter caution are keeping employers in a holding pattern. Yes, that has unfortunately been the case for over a year now. Everyone thought after the last election things would settle, we’d know where we stand politically, at least for the foreseeable future. That has been far from the case. We have not been able to have any consistency at all of whether it’s tariffs or now the war and what is the Fed gonna do or not do. It has just been impossible to know what to expect. So I think he summed that up very, very well.
Weekly Jobless Claims: Stability is good, but it’s not growth
Now, weekly jobless claims also came in this morning. Those were at 213,000. That was from the Department of Labor. Really no change week over week. It’s hard to see that number really move one week to the next. It’s the trend over time that matters. But what we’re seeing right now is that they are steady, but they and they’re below where they were a year ago, so that is positive. Once again, people are keeping their jobs, we’re just not seeing new ones open up. Although, as I said, that’s not entirely accurate.
Morgan Stanley: What a record revenue year and 2,500 layoffs have in common
We did see a company with a major announcement of cuts, Morgan Stanley. They laid off about 2,500 people this week, which represents about 3% of its workforce. And as I said at the beginning, what makes this notable is that two uh 2025 was a record revenue year for Morgan Stanley. So that is very similar to what we saw announced from Block. Block is making billions of dollars, quite literally, and yet they cut off, cut 40% of their staff. So for anyone who doesn’t think this is AI related, and Morgan didn’t say that it was, we are we are starting to see a pattern uh unfold here with companies not cutting because they have to, they’re cutting for other reasons. And again, we don’t necessarily know what they are, or we’ll ever know exactly what they are. We just know that it’s happening.
Now, the cuts were made across all three of their divisions: investment banking and trading, wealth management, and investment management, but financial advisors were not affected. So if you’re a Morgan Stanley client, you can breathe easy if you like your advisor. They will not be impacted by this. And back to the 2025 numbers, they did have record revenue, Q4 beat estimates, and um investment banking revenues were up 47%. So this is a company that’s doing really, really well. Reuter said that the cuts are based on strategy and individual performance, and the bank intends to add headcount in other areas. We will see if that actually happens to be determined for sure. And so this is worth paying attention to if you work at any large company right now. Because a profitable year used to mean you your job was safe for all intents and purposes. But increasingly that’s just not the case. Companies are making workforce decisions based on where they’re going or where they want to go, not just how they’re doing. Interesting trend to say the least, not a positive one either.
Revelio vs. ADP: Why two February jobs reports tell different stories
Now, let’s talk about the three reports that came out this morning. They’re they measure different things, um, but they came out from revelio labs. Now, first it’s it’s important to note because this is a contradiction. And this at the beginning of every month, we see all the jobs reports come out. We see Revelio report, they pull from different sources. We see ADP, which we talked about yesterday. They reported that 63,000 jobs were added from private employers, uh, which is great. But these they all measure different things. And then, of course, tomorrow will be the BLS number, the one that everyone really waits for, although everyone is most skeptical of its accuracy.
So that always makes me uh wonder a little bit why we uh wait for this with such anticipation when um they’re just gonna revise the number anyway based on recent history. But um revelio’s numbers definitely tell a different story than what we saw from ADP, and they do measure slightly different things. But here’s what the data released this morning shows is that the U.S. economy lost 16,600 jobs in February. Now they get into who lost the jobs. The biggest decliners were Amazon, CVS, Starbucks, and McDonald’s, but the biggest gators were HCA Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente, PWC, HCL, JP Morgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs. HCA jumps out, of course, because we know that the healthcare sector is really strong right now. Job postings came in at 16.79 million. That’s sort of an obscure number.
It doesn’t mean a whole lot other than to track it as a trend. And a lot of these things are just about the trend. And that is down almost 10%, 9.8% from a year ago. Now, revealio also tracks what uh share of the total workforce gets newly hired each year. And that is an interesting number to look at because right now that rate is 21.7%, which is well below the more than 30% pace that we saw during 21-22 years. Those are a decent memory, as I often say. But attrition is running at 22.7 percent. So we’re seeing people getting hired at 20 uh just under a 22% rate and leaving over 22%. So that’s what that’s why we have net job losses in their report. That is the net of what this is telling us. So that is February from Revelio. They say that the U.S. labor market remains close to stall speed when it comes to hiring new workers, stall speed. That’s a great way to put it. Openings were down nearly 10%, new job posting salaries were down 1.4%. That is alarming to me because that’s just a single month. And we don’t see that very often. We don’t see salaries going down as a trend.
That’s not positive at all. So um it’s not a great time to be in the job market. I say that often. I wish I didn’t have to, but that is reality. We will see what happens when the BLS report drops tomorrow morning. I’ll have full coverage on that. I look forward to seeing it and then talking about it and sharing what I learned. So that’s it for today. A lot of data. Thank you for listening. Please like, subscribe, share with anyone you think might be interested.
Fun fact: The real meaning behind the gold watch
But before we go, I do have a fun fact to share. I should have uh not said goodbye before sharing it. Gold watches. Gold watches were the traditional retirement gift because they symbolize giving time uh giving back the time spent working. I didn’t know that. I knew it was a thing, I didn’t know what it represented. Here’s your gold watch. Thank you for your time. Let me give it back to you in the form of a of a nice watch you wouldn’t otherwise buy. So there we go. That’s it for today. Talk to you tomorrow.
