Hiring, quitting, opening
The Great Resignation came and went. What's left is a market where few people quit — and few get hired.
The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) measures the labor market's churn: how many jobs are open, how many people are hired, and how many quit. The chart indexes each to December 2019.
In 2021 and early 2022 all three ran hot. Job openings peaked at 12.3 million in March 2022, 84% above their pre-pandemic level. The quits rate hit 3.0% in November 2021, the height of what became known as the Great Resignation. Workers quit because better jobs were easy to find.
That churn is gone. As of June 2026 there are 7.4 million openings, the quits rate is 2.0%, and the hires rate 3.4%. Quits and hires are both below where they were in 2019.
Economists call this a low-hire, low-fire labor market. Few people are being laid off, so unemployment stays low, but few are quitting or being hired either. That's comfortable for people who already have jobs and hard on anyone trying to find one or change.