April JOLTS releases Tuesday at 10:00 ET, and the cleanest read in the release is the openings-to-unemployed ratio. The March print at 7.2 million job openings against the April unemployment rate of 4.2% puts the ratio at roughly 1.04, down from a peak above 1.9 in early 2022 and the 1.6 band that prevailed through most of 2023. An April openings print below 7.0 million would push the ratio below 1.0 for the first time since the spring of 2021, when the post-pandemic labor reopening was still scaling up.
That 1.0 threshold is the level the Fed’s last Beige Book flagged as the line between a labor market still tight enough to pressure wages and one slack enough for the cooling to spread to the price line. Crossing it does not deliver a wage-cooling shock on its own. It changes the prior the Committee carries into the June FOMC meeting.
The secondary read is the quits rate, which sat at 2.1% in March, near the bottom of its post-pandemic range and within range of the 1.9% pre-pandemic average. A tick below 2.0% would corroborate that workers see the same softening that openings already show, since voluntary quits are the labor-side proxy for how many alternative job offers people believe they have. Hires and separations balanced near 5.4 million apiece in the March release, the lowest dual-line pace since late 2020. A continued grind down on both sides points to a labor market clearing more by attrition than by either side moving aggressively.
JOLTS sets the bar for Wednesday’s ADP private payrolls and Friday’s May nonfarm payrolls. A clean below-7.0M openings print with quits under 2.0% would pull the September Fed cut probability back above the 70% range it sat at before the April PCE release held core at 0.2%.