Oakland County lost roughly 3,700 private-sector jobs in 2025. That’s not a rounding error. It’s a year the county’s economy would rather skip, and now researchers at the University of Michigan’s RSQE are projecting a slow, grinding recovery that stretches all the way to 2028.
The analysis comes from the 41st annual Oakland County Economic Outlook, a report produced by U-M’s Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics. The team pointed to three specific culprits behind 2025’s damage: high interest rates, a record-long federal government shutdown, and the outbreak of war in Iran. Any one of those might’ve bent the curve. All three together knocked a previously steadier suburban economy off its footing.
RSQE director Gabriel Ehrlich, who co-authored the report alongside economists Donald Grimes, Daniil Manaenkov, and Jacob Burton, didn’t sugarcoat the path ahead. “We are hoping that a less volatile policy and macroeconomic environment will create a more conducive backdrop for Oakland’s fundamentals to shine through,” Ehrlich said.
That’s diplomatic language for: we think Oakland’s got the bones, but the bones need a calmer room to work in.
Payroll employment growth is forecast at 0.3 percent for 2026, climbing to 0.5 percent in 2027, then easing back to 0.3 percent in 2028. It’s not a comeback story with a movie poster. It’s a county digging itself out from under a year it didn’t deserve, resuming a trajectory that global disruptions interrupted rather than permanently derailed.
The bigger structural signal the RSQE team keeps returning to is labor force size. Oakland County’s workforce is projected to reach 695,000 residents by 2028, an all-time high. That number matters even when the month-to-month job figures wobble, because it tells you people still want to live and work here. Average real wages are projected at $79,800 by 2028, running about $9,100 above the statewide average according to DBusiness Magazine. Employers paying those wages don’t leave easily, even when hiring freezes.
Construction is the report’s clearest bright spot. Employment in that sector is expected to reach its highest level since 2001 by the end of the forecast window. Sit with that date for a second. It means Oakland County’s building trades have spent roughly a quarter century waiting to claw back to where they were before the 2008 collapse gutted the sector. If the forecast holds, they’d finally get there.
Private health and social services are projected to add an average of 2,600 jobs per year, which pencils out to meaningful, durable demand driven by a demographic reality that isn’t going away. The county skews older, and older populations need more care. The report flags federal funding headwinds in this sector but doesn’t put firm dollar figures on the risk.
Manufacturing is where the report gets uncomfortable. The sector dropped approximately 2,800 jobs in 2025, and don’t expect a fast bounce. The rebound doesn’t materialize until 2027 and 2028, and it’s tied almost entirely to a single reopening: the GM Orion Assembly plant in Orion Township. That facility’s restart is projected to bring back around 1,400 automotive jobs. Which means a large chunk of Oakland County’s manufacturing recovery math runs through one address. If that plant’s timeline shifts, the numbers shift with it.
The county that came out of the 2008 recession stronger than almost anyone predicted is now navigating something messier: a cluster of simultaneous shocks, none of which it caused and few of which it can control. The 41st edition of this annual report doesn’t promise a fast fix. It shows a county with a record-high workforce on the horizon, wage premiums that hold even under pressure, and a construction sector finally clawing back to pre-recession levels. Slow. But the direction’s right.
