Colorado is forecast to add 17,500 jobs in 2026, a slight improvement from this year’s anemic job growth, according to the annual economic outlook from CU’s Leeds School of Business.
That equates to employment growth of 0.6 percent, compared to 0.4 percent this year, according to CU. The state is expected to have gained just 12,500 jobs for all of 2025. That’s a far cry from the 37,000 jobs CU economists were expecting the state to add when they published last year’s annual outlook.
“Our job growth prediction was already pretty soft … we saw a much faster slowdown,” said CU economist Brian Lewandowski. “We felt like we were being pessimistic at the time.”
Lackluster hiring in professional and business services and construction accounted for most of the missing jobs, according to Richard Wobbekind, faculty director for CU’s Business Research Division.
“[The construction industry] overshot employment in their sector … They were anticipating better mortgage rates during the year and a better housing market,” Wobbekind said.
Colorado’s job growth has been lagging the U.S. rate for more than a year. After several years of sitting near the top of the state rankings for employment growth, Colorado now sits at the middle of the pack.
“Colorado’s performance has slipped … demonstrating the difficulty in maintaining growth-on-growth for a sustained period of time,” CU economists wrote in the annual report.
Despite relatively flat employment growth, CU’s economists aren’t predicting an economic downturn, or recession, next year. The economy is still growing, in large part because shoppers and businesses are still spending money even with concerns about inflation and tariffs taking center stage.
“Consumers and businesses are retrenching a little bit, expressing concerns about employment and inflation,” Lewandowski said. “Typically, we take a look at that and worry that that’s a leading indicator of what can happen to consumption and happen to overall output, but it hasn’t really materialized in behavior. We’ve actually seen retail sales and consumption holding up … And so I think that’s an indicator that consumers are perhaps on stronger footing than we initially thought they would be.”
Another factor is the tax cuts in President Donald Trump’s H.R.1, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Wobbekind noted. Those cuts are expected to add a full percentage point to U.S. gross domestic product next year, according to the most recent estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.
