In March 2020, fears about unemployment spread evenly across the American workforce. Every income bracket, every education level, and every age group expected the same collapse. The pandemic made almost no one feel safe.
White-collar workers are anxious about job security. But their concern is outrunning the actual pace of layoffs
Jackyenjoyphotography / Getty Images
In March 2020, fears about unemployment spread evenly across the American workforce. Every income bracket, every education level, and every age group expected the same collapse. The pandemic made almost no one feel safe.
Unemployment expectations have climbed again, but this time the fear is concentrated among educated, higher-income Americans, the group that has historically felt most insulated from it. This shift amounts to a kind of class shock, hitting millions of workers who never expected to feel this exposed.
The New York Fed has been tracking that exposure for more than a decade, running its Survey of Consumer Expectations every month since 2013. This spring, the reading it produced blew past 43%, the clearest sign yet that the fear isn't fading.
The New York Fed has asked the same roughly 1,300 households every month since 2013 how likely they think a higher unemployment rate is a year out, then averaged their answers into what it calls the Survey of Consumer Expectations.
The reading had already run hot for months before this spring's jump. It hit 41.8% in December 2025, nearly two points above its own year-long average. A brief dip in February didn't last, and by spring the reading had climbed past that level again. The point isn't the month-to-month wobble. It's that fear has been building for the better part of a year.
Numbers like these aren't crisis-level on their own. The pandemic-era peak hit 50.9%. What matters more than any single month is the trend, and more than the trend, who is driving it.
For most of the survey's history, unemployment fear ran in the opposite direction. Lower-income and less-educated workers consistently expected the worst, and their read on the labor market usually proved right. A 2019 analysis from the New York Fed's Liberty Street Economics blog found that actual transitions into unemployment were concentrated among younger respondents, women, and households earning less than $60,000 a year. Workers in that income bracket also changed jobs most often, a sign of instability rather than opportunity.
That asymmetry held through the pandemic. When the Fed reported improving unemployment expectations in the spring of 2020, the biggest gains showed up among lower-income respondents and those without a college degree. The pattern was consistent throughout: the people at the bottom of the income and education ladder worried the most, suffered the most, and took the longest to recover their confidence.
The pattern has now flipped. The sharpest rise in unemployment expectations is now landing on the most educated, highest-earning respondents. But their fear is running ahead of their circumstances. A May 2025 analysis from the New York Fed found that a college graduate was nearly 12 points more likely to be employed at any given moment than someone without a degree. So the college advantage hasn't disappeared. What's gone is the sense of safety that used to come with it.
Confidence in the job market and worker behavior are pulling in opposite directions. The New York Fed's May 2026 release showed confidence in finding a new job, if a worker's current one disappeared, falling to 43.7%, its lowest point in months. At the same time, the share of respondents likely to quit their job voluntarily jumped to 20.8%, the highest level in years. Workers feel less able to replace a job and more willing to walk away from one anyway, a contradiction that held across every age, education, and income group.
Reservation wages point to a different kind of mismatch. The SCE Labor Market Survey recorded the average reservation wage — the lowest pay a worker says they'd accept for a new job — at a series high of $84,762 in March 2026. The increase was most pronounced among men and college-degree holders, the same group whose job-finding confidence was falling. Higher earners want more money for a new job while believing less that they could actually land one.
Recent college graduates get no comfort from any of this. The New York Fed's analysis of the college labor market found that the unemployment rate for recent graduates stayed elevated at about 5.7% in the first quarter of 2026, with 41.5% of employed graduates working in jobs that don't require their degree. For a group that entered the workforce believing a diploma was protection, the numbers say otherwise.
The last time this dynamic showed up was during the Great Recession, and it followed a familiar arc. The University of Michigan's Surveys of Consumers found that 74% of respondents in the top income third expected unemployment to rise in late 2008, compared with 59% of the bottom third. The wealthiest respondents panicked first and panicked hardest.
But the panic didn't last. By late 2009, the biggest swing away from pessimism showed up among the same top-income, most-educated respondents who had worried the most a year earlier. The wealthy worried first, and they recovered their confidence first, too.
Today's version doesn't fit that arc. There's no single event like the 2008 financial collapse or the 2020 pandemic shutdown driving the fear. What's driving it instead is a slower reassessment: automation eating into white-collar tasks, hiring corrections after the pandemic's overhiring, wage compression that's flattened the raises senior employees used to expect, and what one economist has called white-collar shrinkflation, where benefits get cut, bonuses shrink, and job responsibilities expand without a raise to match.
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