U.S. Quits Trends: The Great Resignation Peak and the Cool-Down
How U.S. voluntary quits moved from the 2019 baseline through the 2022 Great Resignation peak (4.5 million in Apr 2022) to 3.1 million by May 2026, computed from the BLS JOLTS national series.
Research question
How did the U.S. quits rate move year over year from 2019 to 2026, and where does it stand now relative to the pre-pandemic norm?
Methodology
We read the monthly voluntary-quits count and quits rate for the U.S. total (all industries) from the BLS JOLTS national series, averaged each calendar year, and compared the peak year against the most recent month. Quits are a monthly flow reported in thousands; figures below are the live values from that series.
Findings
The defining event in this series is the 2022 Great Resignation. U.S. voluntary quits climbed from 3.5 million a month on average in 2019 to a peak around 4.2 million a month in 2022, cresting at 4.5 million in Apr 2022, when the quits rate touched 3% of all employment, its highest in the series.
Since that peak, quits have cooled steadily. By May 2026 the count had fallen back to 3.1 million a month, a quits rate of 1.9%, now slightly below the pre-pandemic 2019 norm. In plain terms, the wave of workers leaving jobs for better ones surged through 2021–2022 and has since returned to roughly its long-run level, a sign that the unusually tight, worker-favorable labor market of those years has normalized.
Monthly U.S. quits, 2019 to 2026
Annual average quits rate (% of employment)
The quits rate adjusts for the size of the workforce, so it is the fairer way to compare across years.
What this analysis cannot tell us
Quits count voluntary separations only and say nothing about why workers left or where they went. JOLTS is a sample survey with revisions, the latest month is preliminary, and a national total hides wide differences by state and industry. The quits rate (quits per 100 employed) is the fairer cross-period measure because it adjusts for the size of the workforce.
Sources
- BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) - bls.gov/jolts