JOLTS

What does JOLTS measure?

JOLTS reports six measures. Job openings are a stock, counted as of the last business day of the month. Hires and separations are flows, counted over the whole calendar month, as the BLS JOLTS overview explains.

• Job openings: a position counts when work is available, it could start within 30 days, and the employer is actively recruiting from outside the establishment.
• Hires: everyone added to the payroll, including new, rehired, part-time, seasonal and recalled workers. Promotions, internal transfers, workers returning from a strike, contractors and consultants do not count.
• Quits: separations the employee chooses, generally voluntary.
• Layoffs and discharges: separations the employer starts, including firings and layoffs that last more than 7 days.
• Other separations: retirements, deaths, disability and transfers to another location of the same company.
• Total separations: quits plus layoffs and discharges plus other separations, as defined in the JOLTS news release.

How are JOLTS rates calculated?

Each measure is published as a level, a count in thousands, and as a rate. The job openings rate divides openings by employment plus openings. The hires, quits, layoffs and separations rates divide the level by employment. BLS publishes seasonally adjusted figures, which remove regular yearly swings such as summer hiring, alongside unadjusted figures. The first estimate is preliminary and becomes final when BLS revises it the next month, per the BLS JOLTS FAQ.

When is the JOLTS report released?

BLS releases JOLTS at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time, about four to five weeks after the month it covers, on the dates in the JOLTS release schedule. August 2026 data came out on Tuesday, September 29, 2026, and September 2026 data is scheduled for Tuesday, November 3, 2026. Because of that lag, a month's JOLTS data arrives about a month after the jobs report for the same month.

How is JOLTS different from the monthly jobs report?

The monthly jobs report, the Employment Situation, gives the net change in payroll jobs from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey. JOLTS shows the movement underneath that number: how many people were hired and how many left. Hires minus separations is conceptually similar to the CES change and tracks it well over time, but the two can differ from month to month because the surveys use different methods, definitions, reference periods and estimation, according to the BLS comparison of JOLTS and CES.

• JOLTS: openings, hires, quits and layoffs, released about four to five weeks after the month ends.
• Jobs report: net payroll change, hours and earnings, plus the unemployment rate from a separate household survey, usually released on the first Friday after the month ends.

How to read leisure and hospitality numbers in JOLTS

Most event work falls under leisure and hospitality, which BLS splits into arts, entertainment and recreation (performing arts, spectator sports and amusement venues) and accommodation and food services (hotels, restaurants and caterers). Staffing agencies report under professional and business services, so workers they place at events are counted there, not in the hospitality rows. Compare each industry's rate with the total: in August 2026, accommodation and food services had a 4.7% job openings rate and a 3.5% quits rate, against 4.3% and 1.9% for all nonfarm jobs. Its quits rate was 3.9% a year earlier, per the BLS Economics Daily.

• Quits rate: hospitality workers leave by choice at nearly twice the national pace, so caterers and venues plan for turnover and keep a bench of trained backup staff.
• Openings rate: a rate above the total means hospitality employers are recruiting harder than the economy as a whole.
• Separations rate: leisure and hospitality had a 5.0% total separations rate in August 2026, against 3.2% for all jobs, a sign of high churn.
• Seasonal swings: hospitality hiring rises and falls with summer and the holidays, so use seasonally adjusted figures to compare one month with the next.

What JOLTS does not tell you

JOLTS reports by industry, not by job, so it has no separate figures for bartenders, servers or stagehands. State estimates cover total nonfarm jobs only, with no industry detail, and annual revisions can change the past five years of data, as the BLS JOLTS FAQ notes. It also cannot show how many people work for an event business as contractors, since they are not on its payroll.