Going into 2026, Americans remained concerned about inflation and the job market. Those are among the takeaways from a consumer survey conducted by the New York Federal Reserve Bank last month.
In a December survey of 1,300 consumers from across the country, respondents said in the median that they expect inflation to tick up 3.4% over the next year. That was up two percentage points from the New York Fed’s prior monthly survey in November.
Looking further out, the median inflation expectation over the next three years and five years remained unchanged at 3%, according to the regional Fed’s survey.
The central bank calculates median inflation expectations by first asking respondents to assign probabilities that inflation will increase by a given range of percentages over a given time period. “More specifically, respondents are asked for the percent chance that, over the next 12 months, the rate of inflation (or deflation) will be 12% or higher; between 8% and 12%; between 4% and 8%; between 2% and 4%; or between 0% and 2%,” the Fed said in an explanation of its survey methodology.
The Fed conducted the survey Dec. 1-31 and publicly released the data late last week. Though it was conducted by a regional Federal Reserve Bank, the New York Fed said the survey is “nationally representative.”
This comes as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday that overall consumer prices ticked up 2.7% in 2025, before seasonal adjustment. For the month of December, the bureau’s “Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers” — which measures prices across all items, including more volatile goods like food and energy — ticked up 0.3% on a seasonally adjusted basis.
That dynamic leaves the Federal Reserve in a familiar bind heading into 2026, weighing easing inflation against still-elevated consumer expectations as it looks to hold rates steady without reigniting price pressures.
Meanwhile, the New York Fed’s survey also pointed to consumers’ fears about losing a job and finding a new one. Respondents said, in the mean, they faced a 15.2% chance of losing their job over the next 12 months, up 1.4 percentage points from November. And if they lose their jobs, they’re not confident about finding a replacement: Per the Fed, the mean perceived probability of finding a new job sank 4.2 percentage points to 43.1%, which marked a new low for that category.
“Job finding expectations declined to a series low — the second series low for the measure in six months — while job loss expectations also worsened,” the New York Fed said in a Thursday news release.
For finance teams and their HR counterparts, these trends could have wide ramifications over the months ahead. They may indicate, for instance, that 2026 could be another year of “job hugging,” a relatively new workplace slang term referring to the phenomenon of workers staying in jobs at all costs. It came in contrast to the so-called “great resignation” that emerged in the earlier days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
