E2’s 2026 Clean Jobs Americareport arrives more than one year since passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that cut incentives for clean energy manufacturing, generation and job creation.
This eleventh annual report from E2, a national, nonpartisan group, analyzes the clean energy economy nearly four years since it was boosted by the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy investments and six years after many industries were leveled by the Covid-19 pandemic. In the past two years, Congress and the current administration have incrementally withdrawn federal support for clean energy; a move reflected in the reported job losses.
The 36,949 jobs lost in 2025 reflect the first annual job loss in the U.S. clean economy since the economic crisis that followed the Covid-19 pandemic, ending four consecutive years of strong growth. Furthermore, it erases almost 40% of all new jobs created in 2024, the report says.
The report finds that jobs were lost across all the largest sectors of the clean energy economy including energy efficiency, renewables and clean vehicles. Only storage and grid and biofuels posting slight increases in new jobs last year.
Other energy sectors experienced a similar downturn, according to the report. The U.S. energy economy employed 8.4 million workers in 2025 and lost 86,000 jobs, according to estimates by the Department of Energy (DOE). With more than 3.5 million workers employed, the clean energy is the largest part of the U.S. energy industry, and the clean energy sector accounted for roughly 43% of all energy sector job losses, according to E2.
Clean energy employment fell in 35 states, with California experiencing the greatest loss (21,000 jobs). Florida led in clean energy job gains, with 3,800 workers added in 2025 or a gain of 2.1%.
The report notes that the national loss was concentrated in the largest job markets. As shown in the chart below, the five states with the largest drops accounted for roughly 82% of the national net job loss, including four of the top 10 states with the largest clean energy workforces.
One caveat to the job losses is that the U.S. experienced several years of momentum when 100,000 new jobs or more were added each year, and the 2025 numbers are 16% higher than 2020 levels. The report states that “long-term gains remain, but momentum has stopped.”
E2 notes that the job losses reflect a reversal and not slower growth in the clean energy industry.
“The combination of job losses and unprecedented project cancellations shows that the Trump administration’s energy policy shift beginning in 2025 is imposing measurable economic costs on businesses and workers.”
Job losses go hand in hand with project cancellations. According to E2’s Clean Economy Works project tracker, companies canceled or downsized 142 clean energy manufacturing, generation and storage projects in 2025, representing $57.8 billion in lost business investment. In the first five months of 2025, E2 reported that the cancelations, which include solar module as well as battery and electric vehicle (EV) facilities, totaled $15.5 billion in investments and were expected to create 12,000 new jobs.
[Read The ongoing economic fallout of the OBBBA]
The cancellation or downsizing of clean energy projects were expected to create an additional 84,400 new jobs (positions not included in the DOE data or this analysis). E2 reports that, combined, the existing jobs cut last year and the announced jobs that were canceled add up to more than 120,000 positions.
BW Research Partnership, which performs the underlying survey and data collection for the DOE’s annual US Energy and Employment Report, produced the data analysis used in this report. E2 reports that employment figures are based on data from the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2026 U.S. Energy & Employment Report (USEER), with prior-year comparisons from E2’s Clean Jobs America 2025. This latest data coincides with employment estimates at the end of Q4 2025.