Seasonal postings are up 10%, but big retailers are listing fewer roles that way

Seasonal job postings on Indeed were up about 10% from a year earlier as of September 30 and running roughly 7% above 2019 levels, according to an October 15 analysis by Indeed Hiring Lab, the job site's research arm. The headline number hides a change in what some of the biggest holiday employers are actually posting. At a group of large employers, mostly retailers, the share of postings explicitly labeled seasonal fell from 34% at the end of September last year to about 20% this year. The share labeled part-time rose from 38% to 49%. Full-time held at about 20%.

Hiring Lab economist Cory Stahle reads that as a bet on staying power. Part-time jobs are less likely than seasonal ones to end when the holidays do, he wrote, "suggesting that at least some employers may expect demand to hold up well into 2027." He allowed that some of the shift may simply be timing. The same analysis found that one of last year's most active seasonal recruiters has yet to post a meaningful number of seasonal jobs in 2026.

Other counts of the season look weaker. Announced seasonal hiring plans tracked by Challenger, Gray & Christmas were down 23% from the same point last year, Marketplace reported on October 1. Challenger forecasts 450,000 seasonal retail jobs in the fourth quarter, down 2.5% from last year, which was already the smallest seasonal hiring increase since 2008, according to eMarketer. The National Retail Federation expects retailers to add 325,000 to 375,000 seasonal workers in the final two months of the year, roughly in line with the estimated 356,000 hired last year.

Part of the gap is a matter of what gets counted. Hiring Lab classifies a posting as seasonal when its job title contains terms such as "holiday," "seasonal," "temporary" or "Christmas," and it cautions that definitions shift slightly from year to year, so earlier analyses are not directly comparable. By that definition, a holiday-period role posted as regular part-time would fall outside the seasonal tally, which suggests the large-employer relabeling works against the 10% figure rather than inflating it.

The path to September 30 was not smooth. Speaking to Marketplace on October 1, Stahle said August had been strong for seasonal postings. "But what's interesting is we moved into September, and it kind of came down more in line with what we saw in 2025," he said. The October report fills in what followed: postings fell back in line with past seasons for a few weeks, then broke higher again in late September. Stahle wrote that the early lead "could fade."

Individual retailers are pulling in different directions. Dick's Sporting Goods expects to hire about 8,400 seasonal associates across its store banners, 40% fewer than the 14,000 it hired last year, though it hired 8,000 in 2024, according to eMarketer. Michaels plans to add more than 10,000 seasonal team members, matching last year's target, and said about half of last year's seasonal in-store hires moved into regular positions. David Swartz, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told Marketplace that retailers "are operating their stores on a full-time basis with fewer people," including during the holidays, when they would hire fewer temporary workers than in past years.

The work itself is moving. Retail accounted for about two-thirds of seasonal postings in 2019 and a little over 61% this year, according to Hiring Lab, while loading and stocking roles rose from 3.5% to about 9%. Stockers, seasonal warehouse associates, fulfillment associates and inventory associates all rank among the top seasonal titles outside retail and sales. eMarketer projects e-commerce will account for 21.5% of holiday sales this year, up from 13.9% in 2019.

Workers are chasing these jobs harder than employers are adding them. Desktop searches for seasonal and holiday work on Indeed were up 28% year over year; Hiring Lab reports only desktop figures because a quick "seasonal" search option added to its mobile app near the end of 2025 distorts comparisons. "The number of job seekers looking for these types of jobs have continued to grow, but the job postings, at best, have remained within a range around the previous year," Stahle told Marketplace, describing the past two or three years. Earlier Hiring Lab research found that 16% of job seekers on Indeed already work at least two jobs, many of them in retail or other service work.

The 2027 optimism Hiring Lab sees in part-time postings sits alongside a more cautious outlook from its own panel. In a survey of 123 economists conducted with Pulsenomics in early September, the mean projection called for the Indeed Job Postings Index to decline less than 1% from September 2026 through September 2027, with unemployment rising from 4.1% to 4.3% over the same span. Retail sales rose 6.3% year over year in September, eMarketer reported, even as CEO confidence measured by the Conference Board fell to its lowest level since the second quarter of 2025.

Swartz said low retailer expectations, shaped by worries about gas prices and inflation, are likely part of why fewer big hiring plans have been announced. "But that's also been the case for the last couple years," he said, "and the holiday sales turned out to be stronger than expected." Some retailers, he said, may be holding off on hiring until they see whether that happens again.