President Donald Trump rode a wave of voter frustration about the economy to a second term in the White House, promising lower prices and a “golden age” for the nation.
How is his administration doing so far? Despite some wild ups and downs, the US economy looks set to turn in a solid year of growth for 2025 — a trend economists expect to continue in 2026.
Data out last week showed the economy expanded in the third quarter at the fastest pace in two years, thanks to resilient consumers and business investment.
The headline figures, though, obscure some less-rosy details. Job gains have been lackluster and concentrated in just a handful of industries, while high prices remain a concern, prolonging the affordability-related struggles that beset Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden.
Here is a series of charts that illustrate how the US economy fared in 2025.
Labor Market
It’s been a rough year for American jobseekers amid the shakeup caused by tariffs, a pullback in foreign tourism and the rise of artificial intelligence in the workplace. The unemployment rate rose to 4.6% in November — up by half a point in 2025 — marking the highest level since 2021.
Hiring was tepid overall, and what job growth the US did see was overwhelmingly concentrated in health care and social assistance: Excluding that sector, employment actually declined this year. The manufacturing sector has shed jobs for seven straight months.
Those with jobs saw their wage gains cool. Measures including average hourly earnings and the employment cost index are rising at the slowest paces since 2021, according to the latest readings. From April through November, at least 13% of employed individuals saw no pay increases at all from a year earlier, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta show.
Workers with four-year college degrees have been hit hard in the soft hiring environment. Their unemployment rate was 2.9% in November, comparatively still lower than many other demographics but a level never before reached absent a recession.
Monthly job-finding rates, meanwhile, suggest young college-educated individuals no longer have the same kind of advantage in finding work over those with only high-school diplomas that they had in the past, according to a Cleveland Fed study.
Unemployment among Black Americans has also surged this year, climbing to 8.3% in November from 6.2% in January, in part due to more Black workers joining the labor force.
Consumer Prices
The basic story of inflation this year is that it hasn’t budged all that much. After coming most of the way back down from the peak of the pandemic years, it remains higher than what Americans had gotten used to in the decade before that.
The headline rate based on the consumer price index was 2.7% in November, the same as its average for 2025, though it was likely depressed by data disruptions stemming from the government shutdown. Other gauges, like the one favored by the Fed, give similar readings.
The price surge on his predecessor’s watch helped get Trump elected, most pundits reckon. Now he’s the one on the hook for voter concerns about the high cost of living — which haven’t lost their political salience, judging by November’s off-year ballots.
One plus for the president is that his tariffs haven’t delivered the kind of surge in prices many economists warned about. He can also point to a drop in the cost of gasoline, traditionally a hot-button issue for voters. But there are signs that rising electricity bills, which featured prominently in successful Democratic campaigns last month, could take over that role.
“In the past year, inflation has cooled, economic growth has accelerated, interest rates are lower, and real wages have finally increased,” Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. “Much work remains ahead in the new year, but Americans can rest assured that the best is yet to come as President Trump’s policies continue taking effect.”
Trade Wars
Trump’s most dramatic economic policy shift has been toward trade protectionism. The president increased tariffs in 2025 to the highest in almost a century, even though the administration reversed some of its earlier hikes, notably on China.
The president says high tariffs will collect money for the government, narrow the trade deficits that the US has been running for decades and spur business investment at home.
In the first area, the import taxes are delivering, adding revenue at a pace of some $30 billion a month by late 2025. In the second, the numbers have swung wildly and the jury’s still out.
Trump’s election spurred one of the biggest import surges on record at the start of the year, as US businesses rushed to bring goods into the country before the new president could tariff them. Since then, the trade deficit has come back down.
Business Investment
As for the third declared goal of Trump’s trade war, the results are mixed so far. Growth in business fixed investment was solid in the first three quarters of 2025, according to the latest data published on Dec. 23.
But that expansion has almost entirely been powered by higher outlays on computer equipment and software. Looking ahead, economists anticipate Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and continued investment in artificial intelligence to boost capital expenditures in 2026.
Boesler and Holland write for Bloomberg.