Less-than-spectacular holiday hiring season predicted

Anyone looking for a temporary job during the upcoming holiday shopping season might have a tougher time this year than in past years.

Seasonal hiring commitments were “thin” at the start of the fourth quarter of 2026, with only a handful of businesses announcing their Christmas hiring plans, and announcing the number of workers they intend to hire, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

This year’s hiring will be less than last year’s, the Chicago-based global outplacement and executive coaching firm is predicting.

“Prices are still high, tariffs continue to work through supply chains, and retailers are leaning on automation, existing associates, and on-demand pools before they hire new seasonal workers,” said Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer with Challenger, Gray & Christmas, in a statement.

That’s pessimistic, but not all of the news regarding Christmas hiring this year is negative.

Despite inflationary tariffs and record-high gasoline and diesel fuel prices, the U.S economy has remained resilient. Retail sales were up 1.2 percent year-over-year in August, back-to-school spending was solid, and consumers are showing no sign they’re about to stop spending money.

But that resilience won’t lead the level of Christmas hiring that’s happened in past years.

“(This year) will be more about restocking staffing plans surgically than it will be a return to the 900,000-plus seasonal hiring we saw in 2020 and 2021,” Challenger said.

Retailers added 461,500 jobs to the U.S. economy during the third quarter of 2026, the smallest year-over-year gain since 2008, and 15 percent below the 543,100 retail jobs added at the end of 2024.

Exactly how 2026 will play out remains to be seen. It’s possible that some companies have not completed their Christmas hiring plans, or they haven’t announced them, but those who have made their plans public include:

• Amazon, will hire more than 300,000 workers nationwide for part-time and full-time positions. That’s a 20 percent increase compared with last year, and it’s the company’s first seasonal hiring increase in three years. Fulfillment, sorting, and delivery are among the open positions, with an average pay of $20 per hour;
• UPS plans to hire about 100,000 seasonal employees, most of whom will work during the peak holiday shipping rush. Those positions are usually package handlers, drivers, and driver assistants;
• Fed Ex expects to bring on more than 50,000 extra workers to help with bulk package deliveries;
• Macy’s will hire more than 31,500 seasonal employees this year. That will include full and part-time positions throughout Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Bluemercury locations, along with the venerable retailer’s supply chain and distribution operations. (Bluemercury is a chain of spas and beauty retailers owned and operated by Macy’s Inc.)
• Target will hire approximately 100,000 seasonal employees, its usual number, to work as cashiers, package online orders, stock shelves, help shoppers, and keep the stores clean.
• DICK’S Sporting Goods will hire more than 11,0000 seasonal workers, 8,400 of which will be spread between DICK’S, House of Sport, and Public Lands, an outdoor specialty retail brand owned by DICK’s Sporting Goods. The remaining 2,900 workers will be assigned to Foot Locker and Champs Sports stores;

In a break with previous years, Walmart is not announcing how many holiday workers it plans to hire this year. Instead, the world’s largest brick-and-mortar will use a “flexible staffing model” that offers extra hours to its full-time employees. It is also listing seasonal openings on the websites of individual stores.

The decline in seasonal hiring continues a trend that began several years ago.

“Almost every hiring announcement we’ve seen in the last three years is smaller, and more surgical, than before the pandemic,” Challenger said in the statement. “Even if the big names come in at last year’s numbers, the total will likely fall well short of the 2019–2021 (hiring) peaks.”

But the Challenger forecast – which defines the holiday shopping season as the fourth quarter of the year – might be a little too pessimistic, said Robert Kleinhenz, a Long Beach-based economic consultant who has done extensive work in the Inland Empire.

The National Retail Federation is predicting that holiday retail sales this year will top last year by 4.2 percent, to about $1 trillion, and that the hiring of seasonal workers will land between 325,000 and 375,000 positions filled.

“Last year’s seasonal hiring was 356,000 according to the federation, so it looks like they’re expecting hiring to be about the same this year as it was last year,” Kleinhenz said. “Considering the current state of the economy, that’s not a bad figure.”

While they might not be as strong as in past years, the hiring numbers announced so far indicate that retailers are adding jobs, not eliminating them.

“GDP is up by about two percent, which is right in line with where it should be,” Kleinhenz said. “The unemployment rate for the U.S. is about four percent, which is also where it should be. If I you take a close look at the consumer sector, I think you’ll see that it’s in pretty good shape.”

Based on the “flat” retail sales during the first eight months of this year, the Inland Empire can probably expect good-but-not-spectacular holiday retail hiring this year.

“I think we’re probably going to see seasonal hiring in the Inland Empire that comes close to what we’ll see at the national level, and that it will be different compared with other parts of California,” Kleinhenz said. “That’s because we’ve seen more population shifts, and more population growth, in the inland Empire than we’ve seen in the coastal counties.”