Dive Brief:
- Seasonal U.S. retail hiring is expected to fall 2.5% year over year to about 450,000 new jobs added in Q4, down from 461,500 jobs added in the last quarter of 2025, according to new predictive data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
- The report said “only a handful of companies” were publicizing their 2026 headcount plans so far, and that the “pattern of quieter announcements suggests retailers are again planning to lean on existing staff and on-demand pools rather than committing to large seasonal waves this early.”
- In 2025, seasonal retail hiring posted its smallest seasonal gain since 2008, falling 15% below the 543,100 jobs added in Q4 2024, according to Challenger’s analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Dive Insight:
Many of the largest U.S. retailers historically announce seasonal hiring targets around this time of the year, per the report. The lack of disclosures appears to be part of a larger trend that began in 2024 when retailers “shifted toward flexible, on-demand staffing models,” Challenger said in its study.
Andy Challenger, workplace expert and chief revenue officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said that high prices and tariff concerns are also factoring into retailers’ decisions to assess their current workforce before hiring net-new seasonal workers.
“It's more about restocking staffing plans surgically than a return to the 900,000-plus seasonal hiring years we saw in 2020 and 2021," he said in a statement, adding that consumers may also shop more frugally in the fourth quarter amid rising prices.
"The deepening pain from high energy costs may continue into the holiday season, and consumers may contract spending,” Andy Challenger said. “That said, August retail sales jumped 1.2%, and there's no sign of a major spending pullback. But that resilience is not translating into large, early hiring commitments from the biggest retailers.”
Nonetheless, some retailers have released hiring plans.
Spirit Halloween announced in a June press release that it planned to hire more than 52,000 seasonal associates across more than 1,500 retail stores in the U.S. and Canada, calling it “the largest hiring event in company history.” In addition, Michaels said in a Sept. 10 release that it planned to hire more than 10,000 seasonal team members, and added that almost half of last year’s in-store seasonal positions converted to regular roles. Challenger’s report also said Bass Pro Shops and Cabela's plan to host a nationwide hiring event in October.
However, the Challenger report said that Amazon had 250,000 seasonal hires in each of the last three years and usually announces its hiring plans by mid-October. At reporting time, Amazon has not yet released any information about its seasonal hiring plans, but did announce a minimum wage increase in mid-September. Meanwhile, Bath & Body Works, which normally announces hiring plans in early September, added about 30,000 roles in each of the last three seasons and has also not made any announcements for the 2026 holiday season.
For the past several years, Challenger reported that Target has kept its seasonal hiring to about 100,000 roles across more than 2,000 stores, and Kohl's hired roughly 90,000 for most of the past decade. Both stores are currently in the midst of their seasonal hiring push, but have not specified hiring targets.
In August, preliminary figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that retail employed 15.47 million workers, up by about 63,000 jobs from the same time in 2025, according to the Challenger report. The study added that those employment numbers tend to drop in September when younger workers return to school, before growing again in the last quarter.
"But almost every hiring announcement we've seen in the last three years is smaller and more surgical than the pre-pandemic playbook,” Andy Challenger said. “Even if the big names come in at last year's numbers, the total will likely fall well short of the 2019–2021 peaks."
