MassBioEd News
June 3, 2025
Chris Lisinski
Total employment in the Massachusetts life sciences industry remained effectively flat in 2024, a noteworthy slowdown for a cornerstone sector after more than a decade of steady growth.
A new report published Tuesday by the Massachusetts Biotechnology Education Foundation estimated the Bay State had 143,142 life sciences jobs last year across various employers, an increase of about 0.02% over 2023.
That change is by far the smallest year-over-year growth in the last decade and a half for the industry, which policymakers view as so important to the state’s economy that it forms one half of the famous “meds and eds” catchphrase.
In every other year from 2011 to 2023, life sciences employment increased between 1.62% and 9.18% according to data shared with the News Service.
MassBioEd CEO Sunny Schwartz said the one-year flattening is “not a cause for concern,” pointing to prior “ebbs and flows” in workforce trends over the years.
“The industry, just like every industry, is conservative on their hiring,” Schwartz said in an interview. “2024 was an uncertain year with a big election coming up in the fall, so I think the companies took a conservative approach ahead of that consequential election.”
One factor, Schwartz said, could be lingering pandemic effects. She described 2021 and 2022 as “high-growth years” — 6.8% and 9.2% employment increases, respectively — and said some employers might have pursued a “correction” after overhiring.
“We’ve heard a lot about layoffs in this industry from some big companies, and what’s interesting is that with that, you would have expected the employment to go down, but it didn’t,” Schwartz said. “It remained flat, which means that other companies are hiring.”
The longer-term trend still reflects sizable growth during a period in which Beacon Hill steered billions of dollars toward the life sciences industry. From 2010 to 2024, total employment in the Massachusetts sector soared nearly 80%, from just shy of 80,000 workers to about 143,000.
The report, based on research by Teconomy Partners LLC, also said the industry here has outperformed the state economy as a whole as well as national rates of growth. Between 2022 and 2024, employment in the Bay State’s life sciences sector grew 4.2%, compared to 1.1% employment growth in life sciences companies across the country.
MassBioEd, a workforce development and education nonprofit, publishes an assessment of industry employment each year. The organization hosts its 10th annual Life Science Workforce Conference on Tuesday, featuring remarks from Schwartz, Mass. Life Sciences Center President and CEO Kirk Taylor, Executive Office of Education Assistant Secretary for Career Education Robert LePage and Rep. Ted Phillips.
The mix of employers has changed over the past decade and a half. In 2010, about 60% of life sciences jobs were at biopharmaceutical companies; by 2024, that share rose to nearly 74%. Over the same span, the share of industry jobs at colleges and universities, hospitals, and medical devices and equipment companies dropped.
Schwartz said the outlook in 2025 is “uncertain,” especially with significant federal funding shifts that remain tied up in court battles.
The Trump administration’s attempts to cut National Institutes of Health funding could hit Massachusetts especially hard. Schwartz said the Bay State “is the largest recipient of NIH funding in the country, so any reduction to that would be definitely a challenge to our local ecosystem.”
“We at MassBioEd certainly support the critical need for a vibrant academic ecosystem because that’s what feeds innovation in the life sciences industry,” she said. “If that innovation stops or is curtailed, that’s just bad for development of life-saving cures and treatments for people. That’s the biggest effect, let alone the workforce of the industry.”
The Legislature and Gov. Maura Healey last year reauthorized $500 million in state borrowing over 10 years for the Life Sciences Initiative first launched under Gov. Deval Patrick, and they also boosted the annual life sciences tax incentive program from $30 million to $40 million.
Schwartz said she hopes Beacon Hill will turn next to funding operations at the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center. Healey proposed about $7 million for the center, plus another $4.8 million for health equity programs there, in her fiscal 2026 budget, but neither the House nor the Senate included those allocations in their redrafts.
“I think there’s this misunderstanding that the industry just got a billion dollars. Well, that’s not true,” Schwartz said. “Most of those funds, the vast majority, go for capital and for tax incentives. They’re not going to what the Mass. Life Science Center does and the role that we care about, like funding internships and funding professional development for teachers.”