The metropolitan area encompassing Washington, D.C., experienced the largest year-over-year employment decrease in the nation last year, according to figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday.
The number of job losses in the D.C. region, which includes cities such as Arlington and Alexandria in Northern Virginia, reached about 103,900 between January 2025 and January 2026. That change represented a 3.1% decrease in employment.
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The 12-month period was marked by widespread reductions in the federal government’s workforce at the beginning of President Donald Trump‘s second term. The push for mass layoffs at the time was led by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency.
BLS did not distinguish federal government employees from the rest of the civilian labor force, but in a Brookings Institution analysis of 2025 job data, about 96% of 56,000 job losses in the D.C. region stemmed from federal layoffs. That analysis was released in March.
The new BLS data breaks down the D.C. area into three regions: Washington, D.C., and part of Maryland, where 53,300 jobs were lost; Arlington-Alexandria-Reston in Virginia and part of West Virginia, where 26,800 jobs were cut; and Frederick-Gaithersburg-Bethesda in Maryland, where there were 23,800 fewer jobs.
The metro area with the next highest number of job losses in the nation was the Boston-Cambridge-Newton region in Massachusetts. That area shed 30,200 jobs last year, far below the D.C. figure.
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Other metro areas and cities that saw fewer jobs were Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro in Oregon and Washington; Bloomington, Indiana; and Yuma, Arizona.
Meanwhile, the largest year-over-year employment increase was in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara in California, with over 19,300 jobs added in 2025.
