The information sector has shed 227,000 jobs since January 2023, and the contraction is still running
Every week brings fresh headlines about technology layoffs — Meta's 8,000, Amazon's 30,000, Oracle's tens of thousands. Each announcement lands as if it were a discrete shock, a sudden corporate pivot to AI. The ADP historical employment data tells a different story. The contraction in America's information sector did not begin this year. It began in February 2023, it has barely paused, and it is now in its fourth consecutive year.
The numbers are unambiguous. The information sector — which covers technology, media, publishing, telecommunications, and data services — peaked at 3.054 million seasonally adjusted jobs in January 2023. By April 2026, the latest data point available, it stood at 2.827 million. That is a net loss of 227,000 jobs over 39 months. The sector has never regained its pre-COVID employment level and currently sits 1.8 percent below its February 2020 baseline.
This is not the narrative the industry has been selling. The story told in earnings calls and investor presentations is one of strategic realignment: companies are cutting roles that AI can replicate in order to invest in the AI capabilities of the future. What the ADP data shows is something more mundane and more troubling: a sector that has been consistently shedding workers for three and a half years, through different economic conditions, different interest rate environments, and multiple cycles of "this time is different" optimism.
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HRD has previously reported that the information services sector shed 13,000 jobs in April 2026 alone, continuing a longer-term trend that has seen the sector lose 342,000 positions — or roughly 11 percent of its workforce — since November 2022. The ADP seasonally adjusted data corroborates that trajectory across an even longer timeframe.
For HR leaders in the technology sector, the implication is strategic rather than operational. This is not a correction to be managed through a single restructuring event and a cultural reset. It is a structural contraction that has now persisted long enough to reshape the talent market in lasting ways.
HRD's reporting on the new layoff era has found that in some sectors, employment is shrinking as revenue and profits grow — a shift economists increasingly attribute to technological progress rather than pandemic-era over-hiring. The ADP data is the statistical confirmation of that analysis, running continuously from early 2023 to the present.
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Three practical observations for HR leaders in affected sectors. First, the talent pipeline is thinning in ways that will matter when the next growth cycle arrives. Senior engineers who have been laid off are taking longer to find new roles — median time-to-hire in the Bay Area stretched from 38 days in Q3 2025 to 67 days in Q1 2026 — and many are leaving the sector entirely. Second, the compounding of uncertainty is affecting entry-level hiring disproportionately.
HRD has reported that economists are worried specifically about the entry-level labor market, with one noting: "It's a relatively tough labor market to enter, and probably not going to get easier in the coming years."
Third, the contraction has not been evenly distributed: recruiting, HR, sales, and support functions have absorbed the steepest cuts, while machine learning engineers and AI safety researchers remain in shortage. The people being cut and the people being hired are largely different people.
The information sector employed more than 3 million Americans at its peak. It now employs 227,000 fewer. HR leaders who treat each layoff announcement as a discrete event are missing the structural pattern that the data has been tracing for three years.
