Glossary
JOLTS
The BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, reporting monthly US job openings, hires, quits and layoffs.
On this page
JOLTS, the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, is a monthly report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that measures demand for workers and how much people move between jobs. Where the monthly jobs report counts net jobs added, JOLTS shows the flows underneath: how many positions are open, how many people were hired, and how many left. Investors and the Federal Reserve read it as a gauge of how tight the labor market is.
What it measures
The survey samples thousands of employers and reports, for the whole economy and by industry:
- Job openings: positions that exist, could start within 30 days and are being actively recruited for, counted on the last business day of the month.
- Hires: people added to the payroll during the month.
- Separations, split into quits (voluntary), layoffs and discharges (involuntary), and other separations such as retirements.
Each is published as a level and as a rate relative to employment. Because the data cover a month that ended five or six weeks earlier, JOLTS lags the payrolls report for the same month.
How markets read it
A high quits rate tends to lead wage growth, since workers quit when they are confident of finding a better-paid job. Rising layoffs are an early warning of weakness. Openings data are noisy and revised the following month, and response rates to the survey have fallen over time, so analysts weigh trends over several months more than any single print.