Amazon just confirmed its 2026 holiday hiring plan. It looks almost identical to last year’s. Macy’s plan looks smaller. Walmart isn’t running a dedicated seasonal push at all. For the country’s largest retailers, that might just mean a quieter press release. For everyone else competing for seasonal help this year, it means fighting over a smaller pool of available workers than usual.
This Year’s Seasonal Hiring Pool Is Tighter Than Normal
Amazon announced it will hire 250,000 seasonal, full time, and part time workers for 2026, the same number as the past two holiday seasons, with seasonal pay averaging around $19 an hour. Target is holding at roughly 100,000 seasonal hires, also flat year over year. Macy’s scaled back to about 31,500 seasonal positions across its stores and distribution centers, down from 38,000 the year before. Walmart, meanwhile, is leaning on its existing year round staff and additional hours rather than running a separate seasonal hiring campaign.
| Retailer | 2026 Seasonal Hires | Versus Prior Year |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon | 250,000 | Flat |
| Target | ~100,000 | Flat |
| Macy’s | ~31,500 | Down from 38,000 |
| Walmart | No dedicated campaign | Relying on existing staff |
This continues a pattern that has been building for several years. Retail seasonal hiring nationally hit its lowest point since 2009 during the 2025 season, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas.
Companies are not betting on a big seasonal surge.
— Andy Challenger, Challenger, Gray and Christmas
What This Means If You’re Not a National Retailer
When the largest employers pull back, the seasonal workers they aren’t hiring don’t disappear, they become available to everyone else. That sounds like it should help smaller businesses, and in one sense it does. But it also means a smaller local retailer, restaurant, or warehouse operation is now competing directly with other local businesses for the same shrinking pool, and often competing against wage floors set by companies with deeper pockets to offer signing incentives or higher starting pay.
Holiday Demand No Longer Fits in a Single Window
Another shift worth planning around: peak demand increasingly arrives in waves rather than one clean November through December surge. Search interest and early promotional activity now build well before Black Friday, and demand can spike again after the holidays during return and exchange season. A staffing plan built for a single short window risks being short handed early and overstaffed late.
The Real Cost of Seasonal Turnover
Churn among seasonal and hourly service roles is running between 40 and 70 percent this year, industrywide. Every departure mid season means retraining a replacement during the exact weeks when there is no slack in the schedule to absorb it, which compounds the labor shortage rather than just adding a one time cost.
What Actually Works: Speed, Flexibility, and Rehiring
A few patterns show up consistently across current industry data on what separates businesses that staff successfully through peak season from those that scramble:
- Start sourcing earlier. Candidates in a tight seasonal market are often evaluating multiple offers at once. Businesses that source in late summer through early fall and make same week offers are filling rosters faster than those waiting until November.
- Offer flexible scheduling. An American Hotel and Lodging Association survey found that 54 percent of hotels offering flexible shift scheduling successfully attracted and retained staff through peak season, compared to properties with rigid scheduling.
- Build a rehire pool. Reaching back out to proven seasonal workers from prior years gets people productive faster than starting from scratch, and it cuts training time substantially.
- Cross train early. Employees who can flex across more than one role give a schedule room to absorb no shows and last minute call outs without falling behind.
The Compliance Blind Spot When You Hire Fast
Scaling up quickly for a short season is exactly when compliance mistakes tend to slip through. Two show up more often than business owners expect. The first is I-9 verification timing, which has the same deadline and documentation requirements for a seasonal hire working three weeks as it does for a permanent employee, and a rushed onboarding process is where that step gets missed. The second is overtime calculation on mixed schedules, particularly when a seasonal worker picks up shifts across departments or a existing employee takes on extra holiday hours on top of a regular schedule, since overtime is calculated on total hours worked in a week regardless of how the shifts are split.
If you partnered with a PEO like HRDelivered, both of these would typically be built into the onboarding and payroll process automatically rather than depending on a manager to catch them manually during the busiest weeks of the year.
A Quick Gut Check
- Have you started sourcing seasonal candidates yet, or are you waiting until November?
- Does your scheduling approach give employees any real flexibility, or is it fixed shifts only?
- Do you have a list of last year’s seasonal workers you could reach out to directly?
- Is your onboarding process built to catch I-9 timing and overtime calculations under pressure, or does it rely on someone remembering?
If you answered no to more than one of these, tightening it up now is easier than fixing it mid season.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is seasonal hiring actually down everywhere, or just at large retailers?
The clearest declines are showing up among large national retailers. Small and mid-size businesses vary more by local labor market conditions, but they are still competing for a pool that is shrinking overall.
How far in advance should seasonal hiring start?
Current data points to late summer through early fall as the window when serious candidates are already looking, well before most postings historically peaked in November.
Does flexible scheduling actually reduce turnover, or is that anecdotal?
It is measurable. The American Hotel and Lodging Association’s 2026 survey found a meaningful gap in retention between properties offering flexible scheduling and those that did not.
Do I-9 requirements really apply the same way to a three week seasonal hire?
Yes. Federal I-9 verification timing and documentation requirements do not scale down based on how long someone is expected to work.
How HRDelivered Helps
HRDelivered handles I-9 verification, onboarding, and payroll setup as part of every hire, seasonal or permanent, so a fast holiday ramp up doesn’t turn into a compliance gap discovered after the fact. Our team also builds overtime calculations correctly across mixed and stacked schedules, which becomes especially easy to get wrong when seasonal and existing staff are both picking up extra hours during the same weeks. If you’re trying to move fast on seasonal hiring without cutting corners on compliance, that’s exactly the kind of pressure our hiring and onboarding support is built to absorb.
If your seasonal hiring plan isn’t locked in yet, now is the time to get ahead of it.
Need help specifically with I-9 or overtime compliance before your seasonal ramp up? Talk to our compliance team first.