In sports, we often look at, for example, how many goals a player scored last season or how many yards they rushed the year before as a way of assessing both past performance and establishing a benchmark against which to measure future performance.

We do the same thing with economic indicators like employment growth and the unemployment rate with the calendar year serving as “the season.” With the job numbers now in for December (see Friday’s edition of The Twenty-Four for our take on how the year ended), we can step back and see how the “2025 labour market season” went.

Job creation - Ahead of the pack

On average, there were 71,200 more people employed in Alberta last year than in 2024 for a growth rate of 2.8%. That’s a slight moderation from 3.1% in 2024, but well above the 10-year average of 1.6%.*

Alberta also led the country with the highest rate of annual employment growth of any province, besting the national average of 1.4%. Alberta, in fact, accounted for 24% of the national increase, or about double its share of the Canadian population. Most of the net gain in Alberta was full-time work at 92% of the new positions compared to 73% nationally.

*Excluding the anomalous years of the pandemic (2020-2022). Leaving those years in, the 10-year average for employment growth in Alberta is 1.4%.  

While past performance does not necessarily reflect future performance, the employment growth seen last year is a source of strength for the Alberta economy going forward. Turning to that future performance, our most recent forecast is for Alberta’s rate of job growth—assuming the tariff headwinds do not get worse—to be roughly the same this year as it was in 2025.  

Unemployment - Not keeping up

Despite the strong job numbers noted above, red hot population growth in Alberta and the subsequent jump in the number of job seekers, resulted in the supply of new jobs falling short of the expansion of the labour force (those working or actively looking for work). As a consequence, the annual unemployment rate remained elevated at 7.2% and higher than the national average of 6.8%.  

This trend of high unemployment despite strong job creation was also a challenge in 2024 when the annual unemployment rate rose to 7.0% even though job growth was the second strongest in the country after P.E.I. at 3.1%.

Looking ahead, our forecast has the annual unemployment rate in Alberta falling to 6.5% this year as slower population growth allows job creation to catch up.

Answer to the previous trivia question: The unemployment rate in Canada averaged 6.8% last year.

Today’s trivia question: In what year between 1976 and 2025 (the current data series), did Alberta’s annual unemployment rate come in at 11.3%—the highest outside the pandemic period?