What percentage of workers voluntarily quit each month. Workers quit when they’re confident they can find better jobs — making this a clean signal of labor market strength.
The JOLTS Quits Rate measures the percentage of employed workers who voluntarily leave their jobs each month. Workers quit when they’re confident about finding something better — so a high quits rate signals labor market strength, and a falling rate signals workers losing confidence. It’s a sentiment gauge backed by actual behavior, not survey responses.
The JOLTS Quits Rate is published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as part of the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). It measures the number of voluntary separations (quits) as a percentage of total employment.
If 150 million people are employed in the U.S. and 3 million quit their jobs in a given month, the quits rate is 2.0%.
Critically, this measures voluntary separations only. Layoffs, retirements, and firings are tracked separately. The quits rate isolates one specific behavior: workers choosing to leave their employer, usually because they expect to find something better.
Workers don’t quit jobs they’re afraid they can’t replace.
Most labor data measures what employers do — hiring, firing, layoffs, payroll counts. The quits rate is one of the few that measures what workers do. And because workers have direct knowledge of their own job prospects and household finances, their collective behavior is a clean signal of labor market conditions.
When workers feel confident, they quit at higher rates — they know they can find better jobs elsewhere. When they get nervous about the economy, they stay put even in jobs they dislike. This makes the quits rate one of the cleanest sentiment gauges in macro: it’s sentiment expressed through action, not survey response.
The decision to quit is fundamentally about expectations. A worker quitting believes (1) other employers are hiring, (2) they’ll find a job that matches or exceeds their current one, and (3) the economy is healthy enough to take that risk. When millions of workers make this calculation simultaneously, the resulting quits rate aggregates millions of independent confidence assessments.
This makes the indicator forward-looking: workers anticipating economic weakness reduce quits months before unemployment rises. The 2022 quits peak preceded the labor market slowdown by about 18 months.
To know whether a reading is meaningful, you need to know where the indicator has been historically. Here's how the JOLTS quits rate has behaved through major moments since 2001:
The pre-COVID norm was around 2.0–2.3%. The 2022 surge to 2.9% reflected unique post-pandemic conditions. Current readings near 2.0% represent normalization — still consistent with a healthy labor market, just not the extreme worker leverage of 2021-2022. The cyclical low to watch is 1.5% or below; that’s when labor market stress is unmistakable.
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A quits rate of 2.0% can be healthy (falling from 2.3%) or concerning (falling from 2.7%). Trajectory and rate of change reveal more than the absolute number.
Sustained quits rates at or below 1.5% have historically aligned with active recessions. Workers stop quitting when they can’t find better jobs. The 2009 low of 1.4% was the worst on record.
The quits rate is most powerful when read alongside job openings. High quits + high openings = tight labor market with worker leverage. High quits + falling openings = workers leaving before the door closes. Falling quits + falling openings = labor market cooling sharply.
JOLTS data publishes about 45 days after the reference month — the May JOLTS report covers March data. This means the indicator is structurally backward-looking compared to weekly jobless claims, but more comprehensive in scope.
Three things people often get wrong about reading the JOLTS quits rate.
It can be. When workers quit at high rates, they typically negotiate higher wages at new jobs (the “quit premium” is historically 5-10%). This pushes wage growth higher economy-wide. The 2022 quits peak coincided with wage growth peaks. But causation runs both ways — inflation expectations also drive quitting behavior.
Not always. Normalization from extreme highs (like 2022) can show as a falling quits rate without indicating recession. The pattern that historically precedes recession is a falling quits rate from moderate levels (~2.0% down to 1.5%), not from extreme highs (~2.9% down to 2.2%). Context matters.
JOLTS gets less coverage than the monthly jobs report (nonfarm payrolls) because it publishes later and is denser. But labor market specialists track it closely. The quits rate, hires rate, and job openings number all come from the same JOLTS release — the report bundles three of the most important labor market signals together.
The data comes from FRED series JTSQUR — Quits Rate, total nonfarm, seasonally adjusted. Published monthly by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics as part of the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.
The JOLTS survey covers approximately 21,000 nonfarm business establishments across the U.S. Coverage includes private employers and federal, state, and local governments.
The reference month for any given release is approximately 45 days prior — the May release covers March data. MacroRead carries the most recent value forward between releases.
JOLTS Quits Rate is one piece of a broader macro picture. These give complementary readings:
MacroRead tracks this indicator alongside nine others, all updated daily with normalized scores, historical context, and plain-English interpretation. No subscription required.
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