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August JOLTS Keep Telling the Low Churn Story

Published on September 29, 2026

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Peter Williams

August JOLTS Keep Telling the Low Churn Story

The August JOLTS data came in largely inline with expectations, at least once allowing for the noise and revision prone nature of the JOLTS data.
My suspicion is that the headline job churn data will lag other signs of labor market retightening this cycle with AI-related job fears, low net hiring, white collar passive attrition, and legacy churn whipsaws will keep the headline measures of the JOLTS data the most subdued labor market data for some time still. If, or once, this data shows further signs of retightening it seems likely that other data will have already made that more obvious but aging and low net hiring may keep a wedge open between between churn and other labor market data.
The openings data missed to the downside but this largely brought them back into line with the recent Indeed data, which has been largely steady, only very gradually ticking up y/y. Quits and hires both continue to bounce around just a bit above their cycle lows with job churn remaining extremely low relative to the unemployment and growth backdrop. Across all measures, layoffs remain near or at their all-time lows.
The analytical measures from the JOLTS data largely line up with the urate’s more optimistic signal of a peak in labor market slack last fall and, because they often to relate very low rates or churn or layoffs to one another, are the JOLTS data closest to pre-covid levels.
The internals of the household survey paint a somewhat more optimistic job churn picture than does the headline JOLTS data. This microdata is released a few weeks after the main employment report. It shows that prime-age workers are seeing increased quits at a near-2015 pace (that level vs history is similar to JOLTS quits but the recent pickup is much more pronounced) and that hiring flows are showing a procyclical trend away from unemployed workers towards inducing those out of the labor force back to work (which usually would be consistent with increasing wage growth and churn in time).

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