The country’s workers stayed put in July. Just 1.9 percent of the American workforce quit a job that month, according to newly released government data, one of the quietest stretches for job-switching in years. On its own, a slow quits number does not sound like a paycheck story. But switching jobs is how a huge share of workers land their biggest raises, and when people stop switching, average pay stops climbing as fast.
Job Openings Slipped to 7.3 Million While Quits Barely Moved
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for July, released September 1, 2026, put job openings at 7.3 million, a rate of 4.4 percent, with the only notable industry gain in durable goods manufacturing, which added 76,000 openings. Hires held near 5.1 million, a rate of 3.2 percent, dragged down by a 188,000 drop in professional and business services hiring.
Quits, the number economists watch most closely for worker confidence, came in at 3.1 million, or 1.9 percent of the workforce, with the decline concentrated in other services, which shed 46,000 quits over the month, according to the BLS quits table. Layoffs and discharges stayed low at 1.7 million, a rate of 1.0 percent, with finance and insurance cutting 22,000 involuntary separations, per the BLS layoffs and discharges table.
June’s numbers were revised down across the board: job openings fell by 177,000 to 7.2 million, hires dropped by 16,000 to 5.3 million, and quits were cut by 19,000 to 3.2 million, while layoffs were revised up by 19,000 to 1.8 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The bureau attributed the changes to additional employer reports received since the first estimate and to updated seasonal adjustments.
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The Job-Switcher Pay Premium Is Real, and Fewer People Are Cashing In
The reason a falling quits rate hits paychecks directly comes down to a well-documented gap between what employers pay to keep an existing worker and what they pay to poach one. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Wage Growth Tracker, built from Census Bureau earnings data, showed wage growth for people who changed employers running at 4.4 percent in July, compared with 3.6 percent for people who stayed in the same job, according to the Atlanta Fed.
That roughly 0.8 percentage-point gap is the premium a worker typically captures by moving. Employers competing for outside talent tend to offer a bigger jump in pay than they hand out in a routine annual raise to someone already on the payroll, since a new hire has to be talked out of a competing offer while an existing employee usually just has to be kept content enough not to look. When only 1.9 percent of the workforce quits in a given month, a much smaller pool of people is claiming that extra bump, which drags down the average pace of pay growth across the whole labor market, even for people who never intended to leave their job in the first place.
A Sub-2 Percent Quits Rate Signals a Labor Market Where Workers Feel Stuck
The BLS treats the quits rate as a proxy for how confident workers feel about their prospects elsewhere, since quitting is almost always voluntary. A quits rate near 1.9 percent sits well below the pace seen when employers were competing hard to fill open roles, and it suggests many workers doubt they can land a better offer right now, even with 7.3 million openings still on the books. Fewer openings relative to the size of the workforce, combined with slower hiring in white-collar sectors like professional and business services, gives workers less leverage to negotiate a counteroffer or walk into something new.
Low Layoffs Cushion the Slowdown, But They Don’t Replace a Raise
There is a silver lining buried in the same report: layoffs and discharges are historically low, at a 1.0 percent rate. Employers are not pushing people out the door, which means most households are not facing the sudden income loss that comes with an involuntary separation. But job security and pay growth are two different things. A worker who keeps a job but never moves is typically riding the slower 3.6 percent wage-growth track, not the 4.4 percent track available to switchers, so the same low-churn conditions that protect a paycheck from disappearing can also flatten how fast it grows. That leaves an internal promotion or a manager-approved raise as the main path left to catch up, and both depend on an employer’s budget rather than a competing job offer forcing the issue.
How a Frozen Job Market Shows Up in a Household’s Monthly Numbers
For a worker earning close to the median wage, the difference between a 3.6 percent raise and a 4.4 percent raise compounds every year it persists. A household budgeting around a smaller annual increase has less room to absorb rising costs for housing, insurance, child care or debt payments than one that captured the switcher premium. That gap is also why many workers who feel undercompensated stay anyway: with hiring cooling in several white-collar industries and openings little changed month over month, the perceived risk of leaving a stable paycheck for an uncertain one has gone up even as the reward for doing so has not gone away.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is scheduled to publish the next Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, covering August, on September 29, 2026. That release will show whether the July slowdown in quits was a one-month pause or the start of a longer stretch in which changing jobs — historically the fastest route to a real raise — stays out of reach for most of the workforce.
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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.
