January 2026 Jobs Report
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Building AI Hiring Strategies to Staff the Future
The tech hiring market concluded 2025 with continued challenges, as tech job postings declined 6% month-over-month in December. This decrease aligned with typical end-of-year hiring patterns, though the year-over-year picture showed a 7% decline compared to December 2024, reflecting broader market adjustments as companies navigate ongoing economic uncertainty.
This monthly decline reflects companies maintaining cautious hiring strategies amid an uncertain economic environment and ongoing workforce transformations driven by artificial intelligence adoption. The continued contraction suggests that employers are prioritizing operational efficiency and strategic positioning over expansion.
AI skills demand reached new heights in December. Fifty-five percent of U.S. tech job postings now require AI skills, up from 52% in November. This represents an 84% increase from December 2024, reinforcing that AI capabilities have become fundamental requirements across the technology sector.
Report Methodology
To present the insights in this report, Dice used job posting data provided by Dice’s partner, Lightcast, which has a database of more than 3 billion current and historical job postings worldwide. Dice pulled data on January 6, 2026 and analyzed over 7 million tech job postings in the U.S. to gather our specific dataset, which we then filtered for “Information Technology” jobs that fall under “Full Time,” “Part Time” and “Flexible Hours.”
We gathered the list of top employers in the “Industry Analysis” section by using the above criteria, with an additional filter for job postings that only derive from employer sites. This report is based entirely on real-time job posting data and is independent of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) employment reports.
This Dice report provides timely labor market insights derived directly from employer hiring activity rather than survey-based employment statistics. The information in this report is a snapshot of tech job posting data as of January 6, 2026, and backward revisions to prior month’s data may occur from the sources used in this report.
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