How Is the Labor Market?

National layoffs and discharges are running at 1.0% per month, placing them at the 12th percentile of all readings since 2000. This is the share of total employment ended by an employer-initiated separation in a month — layoffs, firings and discharges — and it excludes anyone who left voluntarily.

Separations this low have historically gone together with employers holding on to staff rather than expanding. Firms that struggled to fill roles in a tight market are slow to let people go afterward, which holds the layoff rate down even when new hiring has already stalled. A low reading is therefore weaker evidence of a healthy market than it appears on its own, and is better read next to the openings and quits figures below.

Layoffs, job openings and quits all come from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), reported for Aug 2026 and published about two months after the month they describe. The most recent month is revised as more establishments report, so the direction across several months is firmer than any single reading. Favorable and unfavorable here mean the latest reading falls in the bottom or top quarter of monthly readings since 2000 — low layoffs, high openings and high quits each count as favorable.

There are 7.08M job openings nationally, at the 75th percentile. This counts positions open on the last business day of the month that the employer was actively trying to fill — a measure of stated intent to hire, not of hires made.

Because withdrawing a job posting costs an employer nothing, openings move first among these three measures when conditions change, and are the easiest to overstate. A count this high means employers are still advertising; whether those postings convert into hires is a separate question, and in past periods the gap between the two widened well before the layoff rate responded.

The quits rate is 1.9%, at the 40th percentile. This is the share of employment that left voluntarily in a month. It is the only one of these three figures that records a decision made by workers rather than by employers.

A quits rate near its long-run average describes workers neither rushing for the exit nor frozen in place. Read against the openings figure above, it indicates whether the positions employers advertise are ones workers consider worth moving for.

Of the 84 tracked industries, 49 are expanding and 34 are contracting based on 3-month annualized employment growth, with 1 unchanged.

The filters below cover the 33 industries assigned to a category. An industry can sit in more than one — chemical manufacturing counts as both manufacturing and life sciences — so the counts on the filters add up to more than 33, and the industries without a category are reachable only from the full list.

Momentum is measured as annualized log growth in employment over 3-month and 6-month windows. Acceleration compares the current 3-month pace to the pace six months ago. All data is seasonally adjusted.