Global Layoffs Are Rising — Why Small Businesses Are Quietly Winning Right Now
By: Mark A.
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January 2026 saw the worst layoffs since 2009, with 108,435 job cuts announced. Yet 5.62 million new business applications were filed in 2025. Small businesses are absorbing displaced talent and growing while corporations contract. Here's what the data actually shows.
Published On: February 10, 2026
January 2026 was the worst month for layoffs since the start of the 2009 recession. Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported 108,435 job cuts announced by US employers — up 118% from the same month last year and 205% higher than December 2025. Amazon cut 16,000. UPS said 30,000. Citi is still working through plans to eliminate 20,000 roles. Workday trimmed 400. Angi, the contractor listing site formerly known as Angie's List, dropped 350 and cited "AI-driven efficiency improvements" as part of the reason.
Meanwhile, hiring announcements hit their lowest January figure since Challenger started tracking in 2009. Only 5,306 new hires were announced across US companies for the whole month.
And yet.
5.62 million new business applications were filed in the US in 2025. That's up 8.2% from 2024. In December alone, 497,046 applications were submitted to the Census Bureau. Americans are starting businesses at a rate of roughly 478,800 per month — a rise of over 435% since 2004.
Something is happening that the layoff headlines don't capture.
The numbers are pulling in opposite directions.
The ADP National Employment Report for January 2026 showed the private sector added just 22,000 jobs — below even cautious forecasts of 45,000. Large employers with 500+ employees cut 18,000 positions. Manufacturing has lost jobs every month since March 2024. Professional and business services shed 57,000 roles in a single month.
"Job creation took a step back in 2025, with private employers adding 398,000 jobs, down from 771,000 in 2024. While we've seen a continuous and dramatic slowdown in job creation for the past three years, wage growth has remained stable," said Dr. Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP.
But here's the line in the data that doesn't get enough attention: medium-sized firms — 50 to 249 employees — added 37,000 jobs in January. Small firms were flat. Large firms contracted. The middle is where the growth actually happened.
And at the very bottom of the scale — the one-person operations, the freelancers, the new business applicants — the activity is furious.
The quiet transfer.
When large companies lay off workers, those people don't vanish. Many of them start businesses. Two-thirds of people who launched their first small business after being laid off say the experience forced them to pursue something more fulfilling. 76.4 million Americans freelanced in 2024, up from 73.3 million in 2023, and that number is projected to reach 90 million by 2028. Freelancers collectively generated $1.5 trillion in the US last year — that's not a rounding error, that's larger than the GDP of most countries.
A Yale School of Management study found that small firms actively increase hiring when large firms in their industry lay off workers. Not because small businesses are charitable. Because the talent pool now includes people who were previously unreachable. The laid-off senior engineer from a Fortune 500 company is now, for the first time in a decade, available. And a 15-person firm can actually afford them — or at least compete for them in ways that weren't possible six months earlier.
The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index closed December 2025 at 99.5, above its 52-year average of 98. 24% of small business owners expected better business conditions going forward. 33% reported unfilled job openings. The commentary from NFIB noted that "2025 ended with a second consecutive monthly uptick in small business optimism" and "all signs from questions outside the index appear to support their sentiment".
This doesn't look like an economy where small businesses are scared. It looks like an economy where large organisations are shrinking, and small ones are picking up what they drop.
The visibility problem nobody talks about during a layoff.
Here's where the conversation usually stays abstract, and I want to ground it in something specific.
When a newly redundant marketing director decides to launch a consultancy, or a laid-off developer starts freelancing, or two ex-colleagues from a collapsing fintech launch their own product, they face a problem that has nothing to do with skills or funding. They can't be found.
81% of consumers research a business online before making a purchase. 46% of all Google searches have local intent. 76% of people who search for something nearby visit a business within 24 hours. These are people actively looking to spend money. But the new consultancy doesn't have a Google Business Profile yet. The freelancer hasn't been listed on any directory. The two-person startup hasn't appeared anywhere that a potential customer might search.
And the irony is thick: the skills these people bring from corporate environments — project management, client relations, technical execution — are often excellent. What they lack is the mundane infrastructure of being findable. It's like being a great cook who forgot to put a sign on the restaurant.
Only 35% of small businesses have a Google Business Profile. Only 17% use business directories at all. Meanwhile, businesses with listings across multiple directories rank 23% higher in local search results, and those with complete profiles receive seven times more clicks than businesses with incomplete ones.
The gap between being good and being visible is wider than most new business owners realise.
58% of companies plan more layoffs this year.
A Resume.org survey of 1,000 US business leaders found that 58% of companies plan to lay off employees in 2026. Economic uncertainty was the primary driver, cited by 55%. Tariff and trade policy concerns followed at 39%. And 35% pointed to AI adoption reducing their staffing needs.
At the same time, 41% of companies say they've cut back on hiring. Only 9% increased hiring. Andy Challenger, the firm's chief revenue officer, put it bluntly: "This January total is notably high. It suggests that many of these layoff plans were established at the end of 2025, indicating that employers are not particularly optimistic about the outlook for 2026".
So the pipeline of displaced workers — and potential new business founders — isn't slowing down. If anything, it's accelerating.
And I think this is where the narrative fractures in a way that most commentary doesn't address. The economy isn't simply good or bad. Large companies are contracting while new business formation is at record highs. Hiring is frozen at corporations while freelancers are generating $1.5 trillion. Job openings dropped to 6.54 million in December — the lowest since 2021 — while monthly business applications are nearly half a million.
These aren't contradictions. They're the same phenomenon viewed from different angles. Capital and talent are being redistributed from large, slow-moving organisations to smaller, faster ones. Whether that's a good thing depends entirely on where you're standing.
The rise of self-employment.
I keep going back and forth on whether this shift is durable or just cyclical. Every recession produces a spike in self-employment and new business formation. People start companies because they can't find jobs, not always because they've found a brilliant opportunity. And a meaningful percentage of those businesses will fail within two years.
But this time, the numbers are on a different scale. 5.62 million applications in a single year. Monthly formation rates that dwarf anything before 2020. And the infrastructure for running a small business without massive overhead — remote work tools, freelance platforms, global discovery platforms like Find.agency, cloud-based everything — is orders of magnitude better than it was during the last recession.
McKinsey found that businesses which act decisively during downturns outperform their peers by more than 30% in the years that follow. Maybe the decisive action right now isn't tightening the belt. Maybe it's putting up the sign.
What new and small businesses actually need right now.
The conversation about layoffs tends to focus on sympathy for displaced workers, which is fair, or on macroeconomic indicators, which is necessary. But it mostly ignores the practical question: what does a newly formed or newly growing small business need to do to capture the opportunity?
It's not complicated, which somehow makes it easier to ignore.
Get listed. On Google Business Profile, on Find.agency, on the directories that matter for your industry. Make sure your business name, address, phone number, and website URL are identical across all platforms. Businesses with accurate, consistent information across platforms rank higher in both traditional search results and AI-generated recommendations. 97% of consumers search online to find local businesses, and the ones with complete, accurate listings capture the vast majority of those clicks.
Post your jobs where people are looking. If you're hiring — and many small businesses are, even when large firms aren't — list those openings on platforms where displaced workers will search. Find.agency lets you list jobs alongside your business profile, events, and deals, which means a potential hire can see not just the role but the business behind it.
Promote what you're doing. Events, deals, launches, milestones. Not because self-promotion is glamorous, but because search engines and AI systems treat active, regularly updated business listings as more credible than dormant ones. The business that updated its profile last week outranks the one that set it up in 2022 and forgot about it.
Collect and respond to customer reviews. 89% of consumers expect business owners to respond to reviews. 73% only trust reviews from the last 30 days. Your first ten customers are your credibility infrastructure. Ask them to leave a review. Respond when they do.
None of this is exciting. It's more like stocking shelves than launching a rocket. But stocking shelves is how stores stay open.
Where this leaves us.
In 2025, US companies announced more than 1.2 million layoffs — the highest level since the pandemic year of 2020. January 2026 tripled December's pace. The Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that job openings fell to 6.54 million, down by over 900,000 from October levels.
And in the same economy, 478,800 people filed to start a business every single month.
Small businesses already employ 62.3 million Americans — 45.9% of the private workforce. They contributed 88.9% of total net job creation between March 2023 and March 2024. They're not a footnote in the employment story. They are the employment story, and they have been for a while.
The layoffs will keep making headlines. The new business applications won't. That's not because they're less significant. It's because a person starting a consultancy from their kitchen table doesn't generate a WARN filing.
If you've just started a business — or you've been running one without much online presence — the single highest-return thing you can do right now is make yourself findable.
List your business on Find.agency. It's a global business discovery platform where you can list your services, post jobs, promote events and deals, and connect with potential customers who are actively searching. It's free to create an account. The talent pool is wider than it's been in years. The customers are searching. The only question is whether they'll find you.
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