The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases JOLTS, the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, at 10:00 ET on the first Tuesday after the reference month closes out plus six weeks of processing. The April data lands today. The line that will lead every story off the print is the headline job openings count, and that is the line worth ignoring first.
Openings is the noisiest series in the release. The number comes from a survey of roughly 21,000 establishments sampled from a frame that skews toward larger employers. The response rate sits in the high 60s, low enough that the BLS imputes a meaningful share of every monthly print. The series gets revised in the next release, and again three months later in the annual benchmark revision. A 200,000 openings move in either direction routinely vanishes or doubles between the initial print and the revised one. The post-pandemic Y-axis only makes the noise look smaller. A move from 7.4 million to 7.0 million openings reads as a 400,000-job swing. In 2019, that swing would have been the entire monthly range of the series for a year.
Openings also lags. The reference month is April. The release is in June. By the time the data prints, two newer nonfarm payrolls reports have already landed, plus weekly jobless claims, plus the ADP private payrolls series. Any signal openings carries about labor market direction has already shown up in faster data. What openings adds is a level read on demand, useful for thinking about the structural balance of jobs to workers, but rarely useful for understanding what direction the labor market is moving in this week.
The quits rate is the line that does both jobs better. Quits measures the share of workers who voluntarily left their job in the reference month, divided by total employment. It is a behavioral signal: workers quit when they believe they have somewhere else to go. The series tracks the labor market workers actually experience, not the one HR departments report. It moves earlier in cycles than openings, peaked nine months before openings did in 2022, and bottomed three months before unemployment did in 2009. It is also less prone to revision because quits are events workers report after the fact rather than open positions employers report in the middle of a hiring process.
Through the post-pandemic cycle, the quits rate ran above 3.0% at peak. By late 2025 it had fallen to 2.1%. The pre-pandemic 2015 to 2019 average was 2.2%. The current print sits inside the pre-pandemic range, which is the cleanest statistical case anyone can make that the labor market has actually returned to its prior trend rather than just cooled from a peak. The openings-to-unemployed ratio that gets quoted constantly is still well above its pre-pandemic range, which is the case for “tight” that the openings line keeps making. The two reads contradict each other, and the quits line is the one with cleaner data.
The Fed knows this. The 2022 internal Federal Reserve Board memo on labor market indicators (released through the discount-window FOIA disclosure in 2024) ranked quits above openings as a leading indicator of wage growth. Beige Book references to JOLTS have shifted from “openings” language in 2022 and 2023 to “quits” and “voluntary separations” through 2025 and 2026. The talking point catches up with the data eventually.
What today’s print will move, regardless of how the wires lead with it, is the September cut probability on fed funds futures. A quits rate at or below 2.0% with openings holding above 7.0 million will read as “labor market loose enough on the worker side that wage pressure keeps fading, even if employer-side demand is still printing tight.” That is the configuration the Fed has signaled it would cut into. A quits rate that ticks back up to 2.2% or 2.3%, with openings flat, would be the harder configuration, because it would mean workers see options the openings line does not yet show.
Either way, scroll past the headline number. The line that moves the meeting is six rows down.