New Jersey’s sluggish job growth in 2025 continued a downward trend over several years. The state added nearly 64,200 jobs in 2023, but only 39,800 in 2024, according to data compiled by the New Jersey Department of Labor.
“Things are definitely cooling,” Will Irving, a professor at the New Jersey State Policy Lab at Rutgers University, told NorthJersey.com in January.
Like the broader U.S., New Jersey is likely to finish the year with notably stronger GDP growth than forecast earlier, though growth is projected to decline to 0.8% in 2026, before rebounding modestly to 1% the following year.
“I would not be surprised to see other states start to experience rapid increases as employment growth nationally continues to slow and/or decline,” Irving said in an email.
“Things are definitely cooling,” said Will Irving, a professor at the New Jersey State Policy Lab at Rutgers University.
“A lot of tariff uncertainty likely contributed to slow hiring in 2025 even as the lower-than-originally-announced tariff levels took less of a bite out of economic growth than many expected,” he said.
“Things are definitely cooling,” said Will Irving, a professor at the New Jersey State Policy Lab at Rutgers University.
“A lot of tariff uncertainty likely contributed to slow hiring in 2025 even as the lower-than-originally-announced tariff levels took less of a bite out of economic growth than many expected,” he said.
Irving said he’ll be tracking jobs numbers closely in coming months. New Jersey’s unemployment rate is 5.2% — that’s higher than the national rate — and Irving noted the state has in recent years been a bellwether for what is coming to the rest of America.
“Things have been tepid for quite a while,” he said, “but this notion that we may be coming toward a recession? We’re looking at sort of middle of next year — at least a recession as you might want to define it at the state level, where we start to see significant job declines.” said Will Irving.
Some of those issues — like Trump’s tariffs and the rise of AI displacing portions of the labor market — “certainly pose challenges that would be hard to combat via state policy alone,” said Will Irving, a professor at the New Jersey State Policy Lab at Rutgers University.
The job market so far this year in New Jersey has been “a mixed bag — overall, relatively weak,” said Will Irving with the Rutgers University New Jersey State Policy Lab. “We are through July down about 7,800 jobs, net, and that reflects losses in both a number of private-sector industries and public sector, state government in particular.”
Rutgers professor Will Irving was less sanguine about the office market and the state’s economy. With respect to a hard or soft landing, he said, “it’s still a landing, and the landing that we’re seeing in New Jersey is a little ahead and a little harder than we’re seeing elsewhere.”