Spring 2025 Boston Labor Market Report

The Worker Empowerment Learning Lab has released its Spring 2025 Labor Market Report, analyzing recent trends in Boston’s workforce. The report is available for download here.

Boston’s labor force size decreased* between October 2024 and January 2025, while the unemployment rate increased to 4.2% in January from 3.9% in October. Two healthcare-related industries, Hospitals and Ambulatory Health Care Services, saw monthly job posting numbers over 15% higher in January 2025 compared to October 2024.

The Spring 2025 report also includes an analysis of job postings for computer occupations across the Boston MSA over ten years. Job postings in the Boston-Cambridge-Newton MSA for “Computer Occupations” (SOC 15-1200) reached a 10-year low in December 2023 and have rebounded slightly since. While this may indicate a slowing demand in programming and software development occupations, the share of jobs that do not require a BA is slightly higher than it was in 2015. Total employment in these occupations has also slightly declined over the past three years.

Given Boston’s position as a leading city in high technology and education, these trends are worth monitoring and investigating further. As generative AI continues to develop at a rapid pace. At the same time, as panelists at the Learning Lab’s DigLit 2.0 panel observed, basic digital skills are increasingly in demand for non-computer jobs, including jobs that do not require a BA.

*Note: Due to annual BLS revisions, the October 2024 numbers in this report differ from the October 2024 numbers cited in the 2024 Year-In-Review Report.