Job Market
The median U.S. wage and salary worker had spent 4.1 years with their current employer in January 2026, compared with 3.9 years two years earlier, according to Employee Tenure data the Bureau of Labor Statistics released on September 24. The release adds a slower-moving view of the labor market to the monthly totals for payrolls, openings and unemployment. People may be staying longer because their jobs remain attractive, because outside offers are less plentiful, or because the workforce itself has aged. Tenure alone cannot sort out those explanations.
The survey puts a number on reduced churn. About 20.6% of wage and salary workers had been with their current employer for a year or less, down from 22.2% in January 2024. BLS notes that this group includes new hires, job losers who found new jobs during the previous year and workers who voluntarily changed employers. A decline does not say which route slowed; it says the combined share of recent arrivals has narrowed. That is consistent with workers moving less often, but it is not evidence that employers have stopped recruiting.
Age and sector shape the headline
Differences by age are large. Workers ages 55 to 64 had median tenure of 9.6 years, more than three times the 3.0 years recorded for workers ages 25 to 34. At the youngest end, 74.1% of 16- to 19-year-olds had been with their employer 12 months or less, compared with 9.2% of workers ages 55 to 64. BLS itself cautions that median tenure can be affected by “changes in the age profile among workers, as well as changes in the number of hires and separations.” An older workforce can lift the national median even if individual behavior changes little.
The increase was not uniform by sex either. Median tenure for men rose to 4.3 years from 4.2, while women’s rose to 4.0 years from 3.6, so women accounted for most of the aggregate change. Public-sector employees had median tenure of 5.6 years, versus 3.9 in the private sector; within government, federal workers stood at 7.0 years and state and local workers at 5.4. BLS attributes part of that gap to age, since government workers tend to be older.
Industry differences are equally wide. Leisure and hospitality had the lowest median tenure, 2.4 years, while financial activities had the highest at 5.0 years, with manufacturing, mining and information each at 4.9. Those contrasts matter when interpreting a national movement of just two-tenths of a year.
Reading tenure alongside turnover
The July Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, released September 1, estimated 7.3 million openings, an openings rate of 4.4%, and 5.1 million hires, a hires rate of 3.2%. Quits were 3.1 million (a 1.9% rate) and layoffs and discharges 1.7 million (1.0%). June’s openings were revised down by 177,000, to 7.2 million. Unlike tenure, which comes from a supplement to the household Current Population Survey conducted every two years in January, JOLTS measures the flow of jobs and workers in a single month.
The two releases are better read together than treated as competing signals. Low quits and a shrinking share of short-tenured workers point in the same direction: less movement. For workers, a large count of openings can coexist with fewer successful job changes; for employers, a stable incumbent workforce can coexist with specialist roles that remain hard to fill.
The practical question for the coming months is whether hires, quits and short-tenure employment move together. The August JOLTS release is scheduled for September 29. It will give a fresher reading on hiring flows, but not a direct measure of why workers choose to stay with an employer.
Sources
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employee Tenure in 2026,” September 24, 2026. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Job Openings and Labor Turnover — July 2026,” September 1, 2026. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm
Featured photo: Staff meet around a conference table. Representative image of an office workforce; it does not depict the workers surveyed by BLS. Photo: Andrea Booher/FEMA, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). Cropped from the original.
