The National Retail Federation expects holiday sales to grow 4.2% to roughly $1 trillion this season. It also expects retailers to hire only 325,000 to 375,000 seasonal workers. More sales, not many more people.
So here is the question for your store: when you cannot add headcount, how do you make sure the people you have are standing in the right place at the right hour? Start with one number, visitors per labor hour.
What the 2026 holiday forecast means for your floor
NRF announced its holiday forecast in mid-October. Retail Dive reported the headline numbers: 4.2% growth year over year, a season that may top $1 trillion, and seasonal hiring "in line with the slower labor market." NRF Chief Economist Mark Mathews described the hiring market as a "low hire, low fire environment."
Context matters here. Per the same report, 2025 holiday sales grew 3.1% to $972 billion, below NRF's predicted 3.7% to 4.2%. Forecasts can miss in either direction, which is exactly why you should not lock in a staffing plan on a forecast alone.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas sees the same pattern from the labor side. It expects seasonal retail hiring to fall 2.5% year over year to about 450,000 jobs in Q4, from 461,500 last year. (Different organizations define the season and the job categories differently, so the totals do not match. The direction does.) In 2025, seasonal retail hiring posted its smallest gain since 2008, per Challenger's analysis of BLS data.
Andy Challenger put it this way: "almost every hiring announcement we've seen in the last three years is smaller and more surgical than the pre-pandemic playbook." Challenger also noted that retailers have shifted toward flexible, on-demand staffing models since 2024.
Translation: you will probably run lean again. Lean works only if every labor hour lands where the shoppers are.
Why sales per labor hour misleads you
Many retailers judge staffing with sales divided by labor hours. It looks tidy. It also rewards the wrong behavior.
Brian Field of ShopperTrak, a traffic analytics brand, has pointed out the flaw: "The more you cut your labor hours, the better your labor looks." Cut hours, and the ratio improves, right up until shoppers stop getting help and walk out without buying. The ratio never shows you the sales you lost.
Sales per labor hour starts after the sale. It tells you nothing about the shoppers who came through the door and left empty-handed. That is why a traffic-based metric is a better first lens.
Visitors per labor hour, explained
The formula is simple:
- Visitors per labor hour = people who entered in a period / staff hours worked in that same period
- Labor hours per 100 visitors = (staff hours / people who entered) x 100
Use the same time window for both numbers. Hourly is best, because shopper traffic is not flat. A store that looks well staffed across a day can still be thin at 3:30 PM.
A quick, hypothetical example
These numbers are illustrative, not a benchmark. Say your store runs three associates on the floor.
- Tuesday at 11 AM: 45 visitors, 3 staff. That is 15 visitors per labor hour.
- Saturday at 2 PM: 240 visitors, 3 staff. That is 80 visitors per labor hour.
Same headcount, more than five times the load. On Tuesday, associates have time to greet, fold, and restock. On Saturday, someone is waiting at the fitting room and someone else is in a checkout line. If your schedule treats those two shifts the same, you are paying for idle time at one and losing sales at the other.
How to set targets that fit your store
There is no universal "right" ratio. Field notes that goals differ by location: a mall store and a small strip-center store should not carry the same conversion or sales targets. The same logic applies to staffing ratios, and to a boutique versus a high-volume shop.
Here is a practical way to find yours:
- Pull 4 to 8 weeks of hourly traffic and scheduled labor hours. Include at least one promo period.
- Calculate visitors per labor hour for every hour.
- Line it up against conversion rate by hour. Look for the point where conversion starts to slip as the ratio climbs.
- Set a ceiling for peak hours. Peak hours usually need a lower visitors-per-labor-hour target, because service degrades fast once a queue forms.
- Set a floor for slow hours. If the ratio is very low, those hours are where you can trim, cross-train, or shift tasks like receiving and merchandising.
The step that matters most is step 3. Traffic alone does not tell you what "too busy" means. Conversion does. If you want a refresher on why, read why conversion rate matters more than foot traffic.
Where foot-traffic data does the heavy lifting
You cannot calculate this metric from sales data. A transaction log only shows the people who bought. It misses everyone who browsed and left, and those are the shoppers your associates could have helped.
Accurate people counting gives you the denominator. Here is what it unlocks:
- Hourly traffic curves that show when your store actually fills up, not when you assume it does.
- Peak-day concentration. ShopperTrak data from 2016 found the 10 busiest days made up nearly 44% of the holiday season's brick-and-mortar traffic. That is older data, but the lesson holds: a small number of days carry a big share of your traffic, so they deserve your best coverage.
- Conversion by hour, once you pair traffic with transactions from your POS.
- Fair comparisons across stores, because visitors per labor hour normalizes for store size and volume.
For a deeper look at the data itself, see our complete guide to foot traffic analytics for retail.
Five moves for a lean holiday schedule
1. Build the schedule from the hourly curve, not the day total
A day-level plan hides the real problem. Put your heaviest coverage where the hourly curve peaks. Our peak hour staffing guide walks through the approach.
2. Use flexible hours where you can
Challenger notes the industry has moved toward on-demand pools and existing staff. If you have part-timers willing to pick up short shifts, line those up against your two or three busiest windows, not across the whole week.
3. Protect the floor at peak
Pull non-selling work off the floor during high-traffic hours. Receiving, restocking, and price changes can move to the slow hours the data shows you.
4. Re-check weekly, not once
Forecasts are a starting point. In 2025, actual holiday growth fell short of what NRF predicted. Compare real traffic to your plan each week and adjust the next week's schedule.
5. Judge success on conversion, not labor cost alone
Labor typically runs about 10% to 15% of revenue in most store formats, according to RetailNext. That makes it tempting to trim. Track conversion alongside the ratio so you can see whether a cut cost you sales. For more tactical ideas, see 5 staffing optimization moves to make this week.
Where Dor fits
Dor is a battery-operated, thermal-sensing people counter that installs in minutes. It counts the people who walk in, and it connects with your POS so you can see conversion by hour in the dashboard. Hourly traffic is the number you need to calculate visitors per labor hour for each store, each day, each shift.
It will not schedule your team for you. It gives you the real traffic curve to schedule against, so you are not guessing. See how it works for retail teams.
The takeaway
Holiday sales are forecast to grow. Seasonal hiring is not growing with them. In a season like that, the stores that win are the ones that put a limited number of people in the right place at the right hour.
Start this week. Pull your hourly traffic, divide by scheduled hours, and look at your three worst hours. Then ask what happened to conversion in each one.
Want to see your own hourly traffic and conversion? Book a demo and we will walk you through it, or check pricing if you are ready to get started before the rush.
Sources
- Retail Dive, "NRF forecasts 4.2% holiday sales growth, muted seasonal hiring" (Oct. 19, 2026): retaildive.com
- NRF press release, "NRF Forecasts 2026 Holiday Sales Growth as Consumers Remain Resilient": nrf.com
- HR Dive / Retail Dive, "Holiday hiring is getting 'smaller and more surgical'" (Oct. 5, 2026), citing Challenger, Gray & Christmas: hrdive.com
- Sensormatic, "How Store Traffic Directly Affects Staffing, Labor Hours" (2017, reprint of Fierce Retail, featuring Brian Field of ShopperTrak): sensormatic.com
- Ariadne, "Labor-to-Traffic Ratio: What It Is, How to Calculate It, and How to Schedule With It" (July 2026), formula definitions: ariadne.inc
- RetailNext, "The Store Experience Crisis: Data-Driven Staffing Wins" (Feb. 2026), labor as a share of revenue: retailnext.net
- Photos: Wolfmann via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0), file 1 and file 2
