December tech jobs report shows decline in unemployment, total numbers

Sometimes when the news is good, it looks a little strange—and that’s true of the CompTIA tech jobs numbers for December.

Unemployment in the sector dropped to 2%, the lowest since November 2023. It caps off a strong calendar year for tech employment as the industry continues to show strength. At the same time, 2024 was marked by layoffs. Layoffs.fyi tracked over 150,000 cuts to the sector workforce over the year despite robust hiring and employment. On the national level, the report was stronger than expected, unsettling the US stock market.

By the numbers. Although tech sector unemployment dropped—while the national rate remained virtually unchanged—industry employment declined by 6,117 positions, a drop of roughly 1% for an industry employing 5.6 million people. PC, semiconductor, and components manufacturing went down by 6,200 jobs, leading the cuts, while IT and custom software services and system design lost 2,400 positions. Those losses were offset by an increase of 1,600 in cloud infrastructure, data processing, and hosting.

Active December job postings in the sector landed at 434,415. It was an increase of 165,189 for the month, down from November’s numbers. The biggest drops came from software developers and engineers, IT project management and cybersecurity engineers, and data scientists and data analysts.

Coast to coast. Geographically, California, Texas, Virginia, New York, and Florida had the highest postings per state. Increases were highest—in relative terms—in North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota, Utah, and Montana. Top metros for December postings were Washington, DC, New York, Dallas, Boston, and Chicago. AI and machine learning position posts were highest in San Jose, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

According to CompTIA, the companies with the most postings for the month were Amazon, Accenture, Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, GovCIO, Robert Half, Lumen Technologies, and Insight Global.