As President Trump’s second term began in January 2025, the legal cannabis industry entered the year with a familiar contradiction: retail sales were still climbing, yet hiring momentum had cooled. The most widely cited national employment counts—compiled because federal labor agencies still do not directly track “cannabis jobs” as a dedicated category—suggest that overall job growth has declined modestly rather than accelerated since the start of the term, with the industry shifting into a leaner, more efficiency-driven posture.

The clearest snapshot comes from the U.S. Cannabis Jobs Report 2025, produced by Vangst in partnership with Whitney Economics and released in May 2025. It estimates that the regulated U.S. cannabis industry supported 425,002 full-time-equivalent jobs in 2024, describing that level as effectively flat but down about 15,000 jobs (a 3.4% decline) from the prior year—even as legal cannabis retail sales reached $30.1 billion in 2024, up 4.5% year over year.

Because those figures measure the year immediately preceding Trump’s inauguration, they are best read as the labor market conditions the industry carried into early 2025: cannabis operators were selling more product overall, but doing so with fewer workers—an early sign that the sector’s long-running “hypergrowth” era was giving way to operational discipline.

What drove the pullback? The same report points to three structural pressures that tend to suppress hiring: thin profitability under heavy regulatory and tax burdens, market saturation and price compression, and high state and local taxes that push price-sensitive consumers toward illicit cannabis and hemp-derived THC alternatives. In that environment, companies often respond by cutting hours, tightening schedules, consolidating roles, or delaying backfills—changes that may not look dramatic store by store, but add up nationally.

Still, calling it a simple “decline” misses the industry’s growing geographic split. The 2025 jobs analysis emphasizes that newer or expanding state programs—including large markets that were still scaling retail footprints—helped offset steeper losses in mature states. In other words, hiring has been redistributed more than erased: growth markets add staff for new stores, cultivation, and compliance, while legacy markets shed roles as competition intensifies and margins shrink.

So, has cannabis job growth risen since Trump’s second term began? The most credible nationwide counts available by late 2025 indicate the industry entered 2025 after a year of net job losses, and the dominant story has been stagnation to slight decline—paired with pockets of sharp state-level growth rather than a broad national hiring boom.

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