The unemployment rate for all veterans bumped up to 4.5% in January from 3.8% in December, while the post-9/11 generation of veterans saw their jobless rates balloon over that span to 5.8% from 5.1%, an indication that veterans were having difficulty adjusting to the new “low hire, low fire” jobs market.
The numbers from the monthly report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday also showed that the jobless rates for veterans had exceeded those for the general population for the second time since President Donald Trump took office.
The first BLS jobs report of Trump’s second term showed a rise in the unemployment rate for all veterans from 2.8% in December 2024 to 4.2% in January 2025, even as the jobless rate for all Americans ticked down from 4.1% to 4.0%.
In a bright spot, the BLS report, the release of which had been delayed due to bad weather, showed that hiring increased by 130,000 jobs in January. Many analysts predicted a hiring increase in the range of 60,000 to 70,000 jobs.
“Job gains occurred in health care, social assistance, and construction, while federal government and financial activities lost jobs,” BLS reported.
The most startling statistic to come out of the latest BLS report, however, was the massive revision to the statistics from 2025, which now showed almost no job growth for the year.
Preliminary data suggested that about 584,000 jobs had been added to payrolls in 2025, but revised data with more input from the states showed that the labor market had added only 181,000 jobs last year.
In a statement, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer chose to focus on the BLS report’s data on jobs added to the economy last month.
“The January jobs report shows that the U.S. economy is off to an undeniably strong start this year,” Chavez-DeRemer said in a statement.
In a post on Truth Social, President Trump lauded the data as “GREAT JOBS NUMBERS, FAR GREATER THAN EXPECTED!”
“WOW! The Golden Age of America is upon us!!!” he added.
In a post Wednesday, Daniel Zhao, chief economist at the Glassdoor job search platform, said the 130,000 jobs added in January were “well above expectations and an improvement from the 48,000 jobs added in December 2025. November 2025’s job gains were revised from 56,000 to 41,000.”
“The updated scoreboard for 2025 shows a job market that was much more sluggish than originally reported,” Zhao added. “However, the acceleration in job gains in January starts the year with a tinge of optimism.”
Heather Long, chief economist for Navy Federal Credit Union, also noted a loosening up of the jobs market indicated by the BLS report, but perhaps not for veterans in an economy locked into the “low hire, low fire” phase, a term popularized in 2025 by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to describe an economy where hiring had slowed while layoffs remained low.
“Almost everything about the [BLS] report is positive, at least for January, but the part [worth] zeroing in on is the wage gains of 3.7%,” Long said in a phone interview Wednesday with Military Times. “If the labor market was weakening, you would see wage gains cooling off.”
Long noted that companies “are starting to look around, I think, and say the overall economic picture looks pretty good for 2026. … But there’s still a hangover from the decline in federal government employment as well as state government employment,” adding that both trends bode poorly for veterans looking to continue government service.
In addition, health care, hospitality and social assistance jobs highlighted in the BLS report are not typically job sectors veterans are drawn to. Massive sums of money spent by tech companies on artificial intelligence must also be taken into account, Long said.
“For 2025, I think it’s a minor part of the story” affecting the economy and the labor market, “but it’s a growing part of the story for 2026,” she said, adding that AI investment, more than AI itself, is taking jobs.
“Today, AI cannot replace many workers,” she said. “Companies recognize they can’t lay everybody off, but every company is investing heavily in AI. There’s only so much money you have as a company every year, and if most of that money is going towards AI investment there simply is not enough money left to pay your workers more, let alone hire a bunch of more people. … That’s the choice being made in most corporate C-suites.”
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