Following the COVID-19 pandemic, the job market both nationally and locally recovered and expanded. Here in the St. Louis metro area, the unemployment rate fell from an average of 8.1 percent between April and July 2020 to 2.4 percent between March 2022 and September 2023, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics analyzed by William M. Rodgers III, an economist and vice president of community development research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Since then, however, there’s been a modest slowdown, both locally and across the U.S., Rodgers says.
Get a fresh take on the day’s top news
Subscribe to the St. Louis Daily newsletter for a smart, succinct guide to local news from award-winning journalists Sarah Fenske and Ryan Krull.
While St. Louis continues to do better than the national average, the unemployment rate in the metro area has been ticking upward to an average of 3.7 percent since October 2023. The long-term unemployment rate—the percent of people who have been out of a job for at least 27 weeks—has similarly increased to an average of 19.5 percent, up from 17.6 percent between March 2022 and September 2023.
“The one big challenge that’s been starting to emerge in the labor market has been the slowing job creation, slowing job openings,” Rodgers says.
Total nonfarm job openings in the U.S.—a good proxy for labor demand—have dropped 1.4 million since October 2023. In that same time, hires have fallen by 585,000, quits are down by 397,000, and layoffs have increased by 66,000.
As at the national level, job growth in St. Louis has slowed. Average monthly growth is down to 0.03 percent, a drop from the 0.25 percent seen during the pandemic recovery period (August 2020 to February 2022), according to Rodgers’ analysis of payroll data.
The information, professional business services, and leisure sectors in the St. Louis area have contracted since October 2023. Sectors that have held up are retail trade, education and health services, and state and local government (an interesting observation amid federal government layoffs).
Recruiters are seeing the slowdown, too. “Hiring activity has definitely moderated in the last year compared to the post-pandemic surge of hiring, but we see that St. Louis employers are really investing in critical roles that are tied to their core business needs,” says Erin Ziercher, a St. Louis-based job market expert for finance and accounting at Robert Half, a talent solutions and business consulting firm.
The job market is also more competitive now than it was in the last couple years, she says. According to a recent Robert Half survey, 59 percent of job seekers say there are too many applicants and competition for positions. (The survey’s main finding: 38 percent of employed workers in the U.S. plan to look for a new job in the first half of 2026, up from 29 percent a year ago.)
“A lot of people expect their search is going to take longer,” Ziercher says.
Lisa Rokusek, a tech-focused recruiter in St. Louis for nearly 30 years, says she’s seeing a shift by companies to more contract or contract-to-hire work, rather than people being hired for staff positions. “Staff augmentation is what companies do when they’re anxious,” she says.
During the pandemic, companies were investing in their technology infrastructure and hiring tech people. Now, there have been layoffs—sometimes significant layoffs—and local companies model themselves after Big Tech, Rokusek says.
This means she’s seeing experienced software engineers or developers having trouble in the market and sometimes being out of work for several months to a year. “There’s a significant amount of pain,” she says.
“We may have lower unemployment, but that stat doesn’t describe how slow hiring is and how selective it is and how much of an impact that’s having,” Rokusek says.
People with lower-wage jobs are suffering even more because of rising costs, she adds.
The consumer sentiment survey confirms that. Although there’s a strong labor market, data shows American workers are still “feeling the pinch, particularly of inflation,” Rodgers says.
According to an analysis he co-authored last year, about 40 percent of American households have little to no discretionary income.
Another statistic that’s starting to be widely used to describe economic hardship is called ALICE, which stands for asset limited, income constrained, employed. “It’s basically the share of households in your community that can’t make ends meet,” Rodgers says.
The ALICE estimate for St. Louis is 42 percent. That’s a higher number than you might anticipate during this period of a strong labor market, “which is a puzzle for many people,” he says. “So we have to be very careful … we don’t want to overinterpret the jobs numbers.” Many people are still suffering.
Heading into the new year, St. Louis recruiters are feeling optimistic. “The market here really has remained pretty healthy and resilient after what’s gone on in the last handful of years. We’ve really stabilized as we head into 2026,” Ziercher says.
“In a way, 2026 is starting to feel a little different,” Rokusek says. “It’s like people have held their breath as long as they can on hiring, and I’m seeing, currently, more activity.”
