Employers Expect to Hire 5.6% More New College Graduates This Year

Employers expect to increase new college graduate hiring from the Class of 2026 by 5.6%,* according to results of NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update.

The jump follows two years of lackluster job markets for new college graduates as well as earlier projections that indicated a flat job market for this year’s class.

This updated hiring projection for the Class of 2026 is driven upward by the more than one-third of respondents reporting plans to bring in additional hires this year. In the fall, just one-quarter of respondents to the Job Outlook 2026 survey reported plans to increase their hiring.

Company growth and commitment to succession planning are the primary reasons they cited for their increased hiring.

In particular, organizations reporting hiring increases tend to fall in certain industries, including:

Information;
Engineering services;
Wholesale trade;
Construction; and
Miscellaneous professional services

The hiring gains are also primarily occurring at the largest companies: Those with more than 5,000 employees are increasing their hiring by 8.7% this year. In addition, the overall increase aligns with an earlier NACE study that found employers expect to up the number of interns they will hire for their summer programs by nearly 4%.

The Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update survey, sponsored by Jobscan, was conducted from February 12 – March 17, 2026. Of the 185 total respondents, 142 were NACE employer members, representing 19.9% of eligible member respondents. The Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update survey was also distributed to nonmember companies; this group provided an additional 43 responses. The survey updates hiring projections for the Class of 2026; those projections were collected from NACE employer members from August 7 – September 22, 2025, and were reported in Job Outlook 2026, which was published in November 2025.

*The Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update reports the median hiring percentage instead of the mean to mitigate skewed results caused by outliers. The fall 2025 projection was originally reported as the mean; the fall 2025 projection as the median was -2.4%.