The Challenger report on layoff announcements shows a 23.7 percent decrease in October to 55,597 after 72,821 in September and is up 50.9 percent compared to 36,836 in October 2023. For 2024 to date there have been 664,839 job cuts announced compared to 641,350 for the same period in 2023. The pace of planned layoffs has increased somewhat. The sector with the most layoffs in 2024 in technology with 120,470 in the first 10 months of the year. In 2023, technology also led layoff activity with 120,470 in the January-October period.

In October, layoffs are led by aerospace/defense with 18,465 planned cuts, or 32.2 percent of the total. Boeing has announced 17,000 job cuts in October. For 2024 to date, aerospace/defense has announced 29,526 job cuts compared to 7,720 in the first ten months of 2023.

The most common reasons cited for layoffs is financial loss at 17,300 or 31.1 percent of the total and closing at 14,504 or 26.1 percent of the total. Together these are more than half of all planned layoff reasons.

Hiring plans are down 34.0 percent to 266,743 in October from 403,893 in September and up 657.7 percent from 35,202 in October 2023. Hiring plans are dominated by an increase of 258,000 in retail as brick-and-mortar stores gear up for the winter holiday shopping season.
The bulk of retail hiring plans for the winter holidays are usually announced in September, but this year a little uncertainty about consumers' willingness to shop and spend may have delayed some planning. For September and October 2024, retailers have announced total hiring plans of 534,450 compared to 447,713 in 2023 and 447,280 in 2022. In part this may be because retailers are more hopeful of finding seasonal workers than in the tight labor market of the prior two years.

This monthly report counts and categorizes announcements of corporate layoffs based on mass layoff data from state departments of labor. The job-cut report must be analyzed with caution. It doesn't distinguish between layoffs scheduled for the short-term or the long term, or whether job cuts are handled through attrition or actual layoffs. Also, the job-cut report does not include jobs eliminated in small batches over a longer time period. Unlike most economic data, this series is not adjusted for seasonal variation.

The job-cut report is basically a rehash of the weekly jobless claims report but provides additional insight into where layoffs are occurring. There is industry and geographic (states) detail that is not available with weekly jobless claims.