Employment Declines Across Communities, Signaling an Economic Slowdown

The U.S. economy is a complicated machine full of difficult-to-read inputs and outputs, but June county-level employment data analyzed by American Communities Project paint the picture of an economy that is stagnant or slowing down.

In 12 of the ACP’s 15 community types, the unemployment rate was up and/or the number of jobs was down in June 2025 compared with June 2024. And there are signs in the data that the current employment picture is different than in the past.

Normally, communities with higher incomes and higher percentages of college-educated workers are less likely to feel the impacts of an economic pinch. When trouble comes, it usually hits people on the bottom of the economic totem pole first. But the June data show effects that are spread across all kinds of people and places. The trends the ACP saw last month seem to be continuing, with discouraging employment numbers in communities that lean more heavily on manufacturing. However, wealthier, better-educated places also seem to be taking hits in the June data.

The June Numbers

In these latest figures, the communities of Rural Middle America and the Middle Suburbs led the way in overall employment declines compared with June 2024 — with decreases of 50,000 and 14,000 respectively.

(County-level employment numbers are not seasonally adjusted, so they are best measured by comparing that data from the same month in the previous year.)

As we noted in our post on the May unemployment data, these two community types have the highest shares of manufacturing jobs in the ACP. They may be experiencing supply-chain challenges around the ongoing tariff war with other countries or the data could be showing some uncertainty from manufacturers around the future of consumer demand.

What’s more interesting in these June numbers, however, are the employment changes in other communities, such as the Urban Suburbs.

The Urban Suburbs have the highest percentages of people with a college degree and the highest median household incomes. They tend to be full of people who have higher-end, safer jobs. Yet these communities saw a 0.2 percentage point increase in unemployment and a net loss of 7,000 people employed in June 2025 compared with June 2024.

In some ways, that drop in the Urban Suburbs is not a huge surprise. Business media outlets have been writing about the struggles for white-collar workers for months — and high-earners have seen especially bad numbers.

But the fact that the worsening job picture extends across so many of the ACP’s 15 types, places driven by very different kinds of economic activity, is noteworthy.

The 0.3 percentage increases in the Graying America and Hispanic Center community types are good examples. Those communities are very different demographically and geographically. In the case of the Hispanic Centers, it’s hard to ignore the possible effect of the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement. In Graying America, the data could indicate a slowdown in spending in communities where many live on fixed incomes. The ACP will have to visit some of those communities in the months ahead to get a better read on the data.

Messages in the Data

To be clear, none of these numbers signify a sudden, drastic change in the nation’s job picture. The drops in jobs and increases in unemployment are pretty mild. And the U.S. unemployment rate is still relatively low at about 4.2%. But the drops in jobs and increases in unemployment that appear in these June county data follow a not-so-good May, and together the two months suggest a possible directional shift.

Furthermore, the widespread nature of June’s lackluster job picture suggests bigger issues may be affecting the economy.

The 15 community types in the ACP are driven by very different economic factors. They tend to react differently to changes in the economy — with different economic “winners” and “losers.” Usually when there is similar movement across all the types, it’s because the economy is going through a difficult patch.

These kinds of more uniform moves, even with an economy that seems relatively healthy overall, are unexpected and merit a close eye in the months ahead.