The US labor market shed 787,000 monthly job exits since 2022 — and all of the drop is people who stopped quitting, while layoffs rose

We pulled the complete national record of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) — every seasonally adjusted month for total nonfarm from its start in December 2000 through June 2026, the latest release, which is 307 months. We took the same numbers from two independent sources, the BLS public API and the St. Louis Fed's FRED mirror, and they agree exactly on June 2026: quits rate 2.0%, layoffs-and-discharges rate 1.1%, hires rate 3.4%, total-separations rate 3.4%, openings rate 4.4%. In June 2026, employers made 5.348 million hires and recorded 5.351 million separations — a net of about −3,000 across 10.7 million gross moves in a single month. Of those separations, 3.232 million were quits (60.4%), 1.766 million were layoffs and discharges (33.0%), and 0.353 million were other separations such as retirements and deaths (6.6%); 3.232 + 1.766 + 0.353 = 5.351 million. Job openings stood at 7.359 million, down 40.2% from the record 12.301 million of March 2022. The quits rate, 2.0%, is below its pre-pandemic level — it ran between 2.3% and 2.4% in every month of 2019 — and down from the record 3.0% of November 2021 and April 2022. The layoffs-and-discharges rate, 1.1%, is below the December 2000–June 2026 average of 1.36% and lower than roughly four-fifths of the 302 months outside the March–July 2020 shutdown: only 22% of those months were at or below 1.1%. It has risen off the record-low 0.9% that held through much of 2021 and 2022, not fallen. The decomposition is the finding. From April 2022 — when quits were the largest share of all separations they have ever been, 73.3% — to June 2026, total monthly separations fell by 787,000 (6.138 million to 5.351 million). Over the same stretch quits fell by 1.267 million, layoffs and discharges rose by 454,000, and other separations rose by 27,000 (−1.267 + 0.454 + 0.027 = −0.786 million, the 787,000 decline to rounding). Falling quits therefore account for about 161% of the drop in separations; layoffs moved the opposite way, offsetting roughly 58% of it. The share of separations that are voluntary has landed at 60.4% — the same figure it posted in December 2019, before the pandemic.

The following is analysis, not fact. JOLTS counts flows — how many people were hired, how many left, and by which door — but not why any of it happened. Read across the whole record, the number that changed is quits, not layoffs. A labor market can cool two ways: employers cut people, or people stop leaving on their own. Since the 2022 peak this one did almost all of its cooling the second way. Monthly separations are down 787,000, and every bit of that decline, and then some, is workers who stopped quitting; layoffs and discharges are actually higher than they were at the peak, and still sit near the low end of a quarter-century. The mix of who leaves a job has snapped back to exactly its December 2019 reading. What that means is where the evidence thins, and the honest bound matters. Quits are widely read as a confidence signal — people quit when they believe another job is waiting — so a quits rate now beneath its 2019 level is consistent with workers seeing fewer outside offers, or with hiring having frozen enough that fewer moves are on the table ^sspeculative. But JOLTS cannot separate a worker who stopped quitting because options dried up from one who stayed because the job improved, and it carries no variable for either; this is a pattern the data is consistent with, not a mechanism these numbers isolate ^sspeculative. What the record does establish, and what a single month's headline rate cannot, is direction: the slowdown in job-market churn since 2022 runs through voluntary exits, while involuntary ones have gone the other way. Hiring is subdued too — the 3.4% hires rate is well below the 2022 boom, though comfortably above the 2.8% floor of 2009 — so the picture is a low-turnover market, not a shrinking one: hires and separations both muted, and nearly equal.

JOLTS is a sample survey, not a census, and its estimates are revised; the June 2026 figures are preliminary and will move. Everything here is seasonally adjusted total-nonfarm, an aggregate that hides wide differences by industry and region — the national quits story need not hold in any one sector. A layoffs rate of 1.1% is historically low, but it is still 1.766 million people losing jobs in a single month; "low churn" is not the same as painless. We anchored on April 2022 because that is when quits were the largest share of separations on record. Measured from that 2022 peak to June 2026 the sign holds — quits down, layoffs up — though a different base month would change the 787,000 and 1.267 million magnitudes, and over shorter recent windows the layoffs direction can flip: from March 2026, for instance, layoffs edged down, 1.884 million to 1.766 million. The decomposition's sign is a claim about the 2022-peak-to-2026 span, not any arbitrary starting month. And the reading that falling quits signal a weaker market is not the only one available: fewer voluntary departures can also reflect workers who are satisfied and staying, which is why we hold the "why" as explicitly unresolved rather than assert it ^sspeculative. Composition is not a verdict on the labor market's health; it is a description of how its flows have changed.

A reader watching the monthly headline saw the quits rate tick to 2.0% and the layoff rate hold near 1.1% and could reasonably conclude little had changed. The whole-record read is the part a single month cannot show: that the labor market's cooling since 2022 was almost entirely people declining to leave, that layoffs rose rather than drove it, and that the balance of voluntary-to-involuntary exits has returned to precisely where it stood the month before the pandemic began.