Tequila Turner collected her last regular paycheck in October 2024. Since then she's traded her steady career in corporate IT for freelance projects and gig work, like delivering for DoorDash. Her income plummeted from six figures to a fraction of that last year, she tells me over the phone between making deliveries. She moved in with friends to save money. And she's been hard at work looking for a new job — but so far, no real luck. Turner, 47, says she lost her job over a year ago when her contract role with a bank ended. The Kansas City, Missouri, resident is part of the growing share of Americans who are not only unemployed but have been looking for work for six months or more, making them what the Bureau of Labor Statistics defines as "long-term unemployed." Official numbers about the job market show a relatively stable labor economy with stronger than expected job growth in January — more than half of jobs added were in health care — and a slight drop in the unemployment rate to 4.3%, or 7.4 million people. But the share of people who've been out of work for six-plus months has been rising for the last three years. Typically, long-term unemployment has gone down after the job market recovers following recessionary shocks like the pandemic or Great Recession. Today, 1 in 4 unemployed people, or 1.8 million Americans, have been job searching for over half a year, which in most cases means they've also exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits. Benefits vary by state but on average replace less than 40% of a person's previous income. In today's challenging hiring environment, stories like Turner's are becoming more common.
Why long-term unemployment is on the rise
The pool of job opportunities has been shrinking for a while: Job openings, hiring and voluntary quits (which signal workers' confidence in being able to get a new job) have been sliding since the post-pandemic hiring boom of 2022. Meanwhile, U.S. employers added just 181,000 jobs in all of 2025 (compared to 1.46 million in 2024), and businesses announced 108,435 layoffs in January. These compounding factors mean those looking for a job are having a harder time landing one.
Businesses are no longer adding jobs and are slowly trimming their workforce to correct for over-hiring directly after the pandemic recession, says Nicole Bachaud, a labor economist at career site ZipRecruiter. "The moment we're in right now in labor is stagnation across the board for workers and for employers," she says. While workers moved jobs (and even quit on their own) after other recessions like the 2008 financial crisis or Covid-19 pandemic, today they're staying put. "Unemployment is becoming more of a status quo versus a temporary position for workers who find themselves out of their job," Bachaud says. People who've been out of work long-term tell CNBC Make It the experience has chipped away at their confidence and made them question their career decisions. Some have taken on part-time work to pay for bills, while others have moved in with family. They say they're doing everything by the job-searching playbook, and even trying new methods, but still nothing seems to be working.
Big challenges for young workers
The tough hiring market is hitting certain demographics hard, including young professionals. Chris Fong, 25, says he thought it wouldn't be too hard to find a job when he was laid off from a startup in March 2025. He went to a top-tier university, did well at his previous jobs and lives in the Bay Area, a major job market. But in the months since, Fong says he's noticed a drop in entry-level jobs, and he's often competing with candidates with more years of experience or higher graduate degrees than him. Fong's observations reflect a larger trend: Entry-level job postings were down by about 35% in mid-2025 compared to January 2023, according to research from Revelio Labs.
Chris Fong is an early-career job seeker in the San Francisco Bay Area. Courtesy of subject
He's also noticed the interview process getting longer as companies get "more picky," he says. One recent company required eight rounds, and he still didn't get the role. Fong says he's been living on savings and recently took up a part-time job working at a friend's film rental gear company. It's minimum wage but helps pay the bills. In January, he started documenting his unemployment journey on Instagram as a creative outlet and to regain control of his life and career story. "I was tired of letting these recruiters and companies judge me based off my previous experience" on a resume, he says. "I was like, 'I'm going to start something myself.'"
Long-term unemployment is still talked about a personal shortcoming when in reality it's increasingly a structural issue. Sakshi Patel Job seeker in Boston
Some recent grads say changing immigration policies add stress to their search. Sakshi Patel, 22, earned her master's degree in financial management in May 2025. She's currently volunteering at a nonprofit as a business analyst, but as an international student from India needs to find employment by the spring in order to stay in the U.S. Now, she's worried new policies, like the Trump administration's revamping the H1-B visa program and adding a $100,000 application fee, will mean companies won't be looking to hire international students who need visa sponsorship like her.
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