The government’s clearest monthly snapshot of hiring and firing showed a labor market still moving in both directions at a steady clip in July. Employers hired 5.1 million people, let go of 1.7 million through layoffs and discharges, and watched another 3.1 million walk out the door on their own by quitting. All three figures, released September 1 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, held close to June’s levels rather than swinging sharply in either direction.
The Three Numbers That Make Up Turnover
The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, known as JOLTS, tracks three flows every month: hires, quits, and layoffs and discharges, plus a smaller category of other separations that includes retirements and deaths. In July, hires and total separations both came in at 5.1 million.
Within separations, quits accounted for 3.1 million and layoffs and discharges for 1.7 million, with the remaining roughly 350,000 falling into that other-separations category. Because hires and total separations were nearly identical in July, the total number of filled jobs in the economy held essentially steady over the month, even though millions of individual people moved in and out of jobs underneath that stable total.
Free retirement updates: Enrollment and claim windows come and go, and missing one can cost you real money. The free Retirement Shield newsletter keeps you ahead of the deadlines that matter. Sign up free.
Quits Still Outnumber Layoffs by Nearly Two to One
The gap between quits and layoffs matters because it says something about who is deciding to leave a job. Quits are voluntary, generally workers leaving for something else or leaving the workforce on their own terms; layoffs and discharges are employer-driven. At 3.1 million quits against 1.7 million layoffs and discharges, according to the BLS summary released September 1, workers walking away voluntarily still outnumbered workers being let go by nearly two to one in July.
That ratio has held in roughly the same range for months, which is one reason economists watching JOLTS tend to treat a widening gap between quits and layoffs, in either direction, as a more meaningful signal than either number taken alone.
How JOLTS Differs From the Monthly Jobs Report
JOLTS is a separate survey from the more widely quoted monthly jobs report, formally the Employment Situation, which produces the unemployment rate and the payroll-growth headline most news coverage leans on. JOLTS instead measures the churn underneath that topline number: how many positions employers opened, filled, and lost in a given month, broken out by hires, quits, and layoffs and discharges. The two releases come from different survey methods and are published on different schedules, which is why a JOLTS report and a jobs report covering a similar period can each get attention in the same news cycle without describing the same measurement.
What Changed From the Prior Month’s Numbers
The September 1 release also revised June’s figures. Job openings for June were revised down by 177,000 to 7.2 million, hires were revised down by 16,000 to 5.3 million, and total separations were revised down by 14,000 to 5.3 million. Quits for June were revised down by 19,000 to 3.2 million, while layoffs and discharges were revised up by 19,000 to 1.8 million, according to the same September 1 summary.
Those revisions moved June’s numbers slightly closer to July’s, reinforcing that the month-to-month change was genuinely small rather than an artifact of preliminary data still settling. The original June figures, published in the BLS’s August 4 release, had already shown a labor market in roughly the same posture before this round of revisions.
Where the Movement Showed Up
Not every industry sat still. Hires fell most sharply in professional and business services, down 188,000 over the month, while quits pulled back the most in other services, down 46,000. Layoffs and discharges eased the most in finance and insurance, down 22,000.
Job openings, by contrast, grew in durable goods manufacturing, up 76,000, the one industry the BLS flagged as a clear mover in July’s data. A decline in hires inside one industry alongside little change in layoffs, as happened in professional and business services, tends to mean employers there are being pickier about who they bring on rather than actively cutting staff.
Why the Flows Matter More Than Any Single Headline Number
A hiring figure by itself does not say whether a labor market is healthy; a market can hire a lot of people while also losing a lot of people, or hire almost no one while barely losing anyone either. Reading all three JOLTS flows together turns the July data into a read on household job security: hiring held steady, involuntary job loss stayed at roughly one-third the pace of voluntary quitting, and none of it moved enough for the BLS to call it more than little changed.
That combination, steady hiring and a low layoff rate relative to quits, is generally read as a market where workers still hold some leverage: people are choosing to leave jobs on their own terms more often than employers are pushing them out. The next update, covering August, is scheduled for September 29, and it will show whether that balance held into the following month or started to tip.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
More Financial Reading
