Seasonal and Holiday Hiring Surge Statistics 2026

A Smaller Holiday Season Than Any Year Since 2009

Challenger, Gray & Christmas’s most recently published holiday-hiring commentary states retail employers would add under 500,000 seasonal jobs for the 2025 holiday season, the smallest seasonal gain since 2009. That is a real, dated, named-report figure, not a rounded estimate, and it marks a genuinely thin year for retail seasonal hiring by historical standards.

The same commentary flagged Transportation and Warehousing as also expected to underperform recent seasonal-hiring patterns, and characterized overall seasonal hiring announcements across the period as limited, a broader signal than retail alone.

Why This Is 2025 Data, Not a 2026 Reading

This page’s title says 2026, but the retail figure above describes the 2025 holiday season specifically, published in September 2025. Challenger Gray’s report covering the 2026 holiday season would typically publish in September or October 2026, after this research was completed, so no 2026-season retail figure exists to cite yet.

Stating that year explicitly matters here: treating a 2025-season figure as a current 2026 reading would misrepresent when the underlying hiring activity happened.

Summer Carries Its Own Seasonal Surge

The winter holiday season is not the only seasonal-hiring peak a staffing firm should track. The National Restaurant Association, in a direct, primary figure from its own published research, projected restaurants would add 450,000 seasonal positions during summer 2026, while also flagging a declining “prime labor pool” that could make that hiring more difficult than in past summers.

That is a separate, sizable hiring surge from the retail holiday season above, on a completely different calendar, worth tracking as its own distinct opportunity rather than folding into a single generic “seasonal hiring” framing.

What the Government Data Confirms About the Yearly Pattern

BLS Current Employment Statistics data for the Leisure and Hospitality supersector, a direct, primary figure, shows 16,931,000 employees in July 2026 on a preliminary basis and 16,971,000 in June 2026. The underlying series shows a consistent, recurring cyclical pattern: summer months running higher than winter months every year in the 2016 to 2026 series, for example June 2025 at 16,837,000 versus February 2025 at 16,796,000.

That is a confirmed, recurring pattern spanning a decade of government data, not a one-time seasonal blip, evidence that the summer hospitality surge is a structural, repeatable feature of that segment’s hiring calendar.

What This Means for Pitching a Seasonal Segment

A staffing firm working retail or logistics should read the 2025 holiday-hiring figures as a caution: a thinner-than-usual season can mean a smaller, more competitive pool of open job orders during what is usually the busiest stretch of the year. A firm working hospitality or restaurant staffing, by contrast, can point to the National Restaurant Association’s 450,000-position projection and the confirmed summer-versus-winter employment pattern as evidence of a real, recurring surge worth building a dedicated seasonal pitch around.

Human + AI SDRs can ramp outreach ahead of either calendar, summer hospitality or winter retail, so a firm’s pipeline is already warm before the surge itself starts, not scrambling to build one once the season is already underway.

The Numbers

Sources

The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.

• Challenger, Gray & Christmas, 2025 holiday season hiring commentary
• National Restaurant Association, “Restaurants projected to add 450k seasonal jobs this summer”
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, Leisure and Hospitality employment series (CES7000000001)

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