Employee turnover statistics: quit rates, early attrition, causes and cost
This page collects the turnover numbers HR teams cite most often and traces each to the organisation that measured it: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (JOLTS) for quits and separations, Gallup, Pew Research and Work Institute for why people leave, SHRM and Gallup for cost. Where a number comes from a self-reported survey rather than payroll records, the text says so. Last checked: September 17, 2026, against the JOLTS release of September 1, 2026.
How many people quit: the JOLTS numbers
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In July 2026, U.S. employers hired 5.1 million people and recorded 5.1 million separations. Quits were 3.1 million, a quits rate of 1.9 percent; layoffs and discharges were 1.7 million, a rate of 1.0 percent; job openings stood at 7.3 million (BLS, Job Openings and Labor Turnover, July 2026).
The annual figures show the slowdown. In 2025 the annual hires level was 63.0 million, down 1.5 million from 2024. Total separations were 62.8 million. Quits fell by 1.3 million to 38.0 million and made up 60.6 percent of separations, while layoffs and discharges rose by 1.2 million to 21.2 million, or 33.8 percent (BLS, JOLTS January 2026 release with 2025 annual estimates). The annual average quits rate was 2.0 percent in 2025 against 2.1 percent in 2024; the hires rate was 3.3 percent against 3.4 percent.
Put simply: about one in fifty U.S. workers quits in a typical month. Fewer people leave voluntarily than in 2022 and 2023, and a larger share of exits is now employer-initiated.
Quits rate by industry
Hospitality and retail run at two to more than four times the quits rate of manufacturing, finance or government. The table shows the quits rate (quits as a percent of employment) for July 2026, the latest month in the September 1 release, next to the 2024 and 2025 annual averages.
| Industry | Quits rate, July 2026 (seasonally adjusted, preliminary) | Annual average 2024 | Annual average 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total nonfarm | 1.9% | 2.1% | 2.0% |
| Total private | 2.1% | 2.3% | 2.2% |
| Accommodation and food services | 3.5% | 4.1% | 4.2% |
| Leisure and hospitality | 3.4% | 3.9% | 3.9% |
| Retail trade | 3.1% | 2.7% | 2.6% |
| Construction | 1.9% | 1.8% | 1.8% |
| Health care and social assistance | 1.9% | 2.2% | 2.0% |
| Professional and business services | 1.8% | 2.4% | 2.3% |
| Manufacturing | 1.4% | 1.6% | 1.4% |
| Finance and insurance | 1.2% | 1.1% | 1.3% |
| Information | 1.0% | 1.5% | 1.3% |
| Government | 0.8% | 0.8% | 0.8% |
Source: BLS JOLTS Table 4, quits levels and rates by industry, seasonally adjusted (July 2026 release) and BLS JOLTS Table 22, annual average quits rates by industry, not seasonally adjusted (2021 to 2025). Monthly rates are seasonally adjusted, annual averages are not, so compare down the columns rather than across.
Early attrition: the first year
- As much as 40 percent of all employee turnover happens within the first year of employment, according to Work Institute's exit interview data (Work Institute, 2025 Retention Report). The report calls first-year turnover the costliest kind: a new hire who leaves rarely repays the recruiting and onboarding spend.
- Only 12 percent of employees strongly agree that their organisation does a great job onboarding new employees (Gallup, Why the Onboarding Experience Is Key for Retention). This is a self-reported measure, not a turnover count.
- Only 6 percent of senior HR executives report always conducting exit interviews with departed employees, in a Work Institute survey of 88 HR and operational leaders (Work Institute, 2025 Retention Report). Most organisations therefore cannot see where early attrition starts. A structured exit interview process is the cheapest fix.
Early attrition is partly a hiring problem. A gap between the job as advertised and the job as lived shows up in the first months, so screening against written criteria before the interview (100Hires, for example, scores candidates from 0 to 100 against the job's criteria) pays off in fewer first-year exits. The cost of a bad hire page covers that side.
How many employees are looking to leave
In the fourth quarter of 2025, 11 percent of U.S. workers were actively looking for a new job and 40 percent were watching for opportunities, 51 percent in total. Since Gallup began tracking in 2015 the combined figure has ranged from 42 percent in 2018 to 52 percent in the third quarter of 2025. Among Gen Z workers, 17 percent were actively seeking and 44 percent watching. Yet only 28 percent of workers said it was a good time to find a quality job (Gallup, U.S. Worker Thriving Declines as Job Market Pessimism Grows, March 2026; 22,368 workers surveyed October 30 to November 13, 2025).
Gallup calls this the Great Detachment: high intent to leave, low confidence that leaving is possible. In its November 2024 survey of 22,558 employees only 45 percent knew what was expected of them at work (Gallup, The Great Detachment: Why Employees Feel Stuck). The quits rate is low because exits are delayed, not cancelled.
Why people leave
- 42 percent of employees who voluntarily left their organisation in the past year say their manager or organisation could have done something to prevent it. 45 percent say no manager or leader discussed their satisfaction, performance or future with them in the three months before they left. 77 percent either left within three months of starting to search or never actively searched. Asked what would have kept them, 30 percent named compensation and benefits, 21 percent positive manager interactions such as recognition and listening, and 11 percent career advancement (Gallup, 42% of Employee Turnover Is Preventable but Often Ignored; web survey of 717 voluntary leavers, November 2023). Gallup's 2019 estimate of the preventable share was 52 percent (Gallup, This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion, 2019).
- Work Institute's 2024 exit interviews rank the first reason for leaving as career development (18.9 percent), health and family (12.4 percent), work-life balance (11.9 percent), management behavior (9.7 percent), relocation (8.4 percent), total rewards (8.2 percent), job characteristics (8.0 percent), retirement (7.4 percent), environment (7.0 percent) and involuntary (6.6 percent) (Work Institute, 2025 Retention Report).
- Among U.S. workers who quit a job in 2021, 63 percent cited low pay, 63 percent no opportunities for advancement and 57 percent feeling disrespected at work; 48 percent named child care issues, 45 percent a lack of flexibility over hours and 43 percent poor benefits (Pew Research Center, March 2022; 6,627 adults surveyed February 7 to 13, 2022, including 965 who left a job by choice).
Pay opens the conversation; management and growth close it. The employee retention strategy guide covers what to do about each driver. This page stays on the measurements.
Pay and leaving: how big a raise moves people
A small raise is enough to move people who are already disengaged; engaged people take much more. Gallup wrote in July 2021 that "it takes more than a 20% pay raise to lure most employees away from a manager who engages them, and next to nothing to poach most disengaged workers" (Gallup, The Great Resignation Is Really the Great Discontent, 2021). The article does not say which survey year that estimate comes from.
Pay is also rarely the whole story. Asked for the single primary reason they left their previous job (one answer each), 16 percent of U.S. employees named pay and benefits in 2024. That was still the most common single answer, but engagement and culture reasons (37 percent) and wellbeing, personal and relocation reasons (31 percent) together accounted for 68 percent of departures (Gallup, Employee Retention and Attraction indicator).
| Measure | Figure | Who measured it, how |
|---|---|---|
| Pay and benefits as the primary reason for leaving the last job | 21% pre-pandemic, 14% in 2021, 20% in 2022, 16% in 2023, 16% in 2024 | Gallup surveys of U.S. employees, self-reported |
| Rate "significantly increases my income or improves my benefits package" as very important when weighing a job at a different organization | 59% in 2022, 58% in 2023, 54% in 2024, 53% in 2025 | Same Gallup indicator, self-reported |
| Median annual wage growth, job switchers vs job stayers, August 2026 | 5.0% vs 3.6% (3-month average) | Atlanta Fed, Census Bureau CPS microdata, same people 12 months apart |
| Same, 12-month average | 4.3% vs 3.2% (Dec 2019), 7.7% vs 5.6% (Dec 2022), 4.4% vs 3.6% (Aug 2026) | Atlanta Fed downloadable data, job switcher series |
Source: Gallup, Employee Retention and Attraction indicator (updated August 2026); Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Wage Growth Tracker (updated September 10, 2026).
The Atlanta Fed answers the practical question: how much more do people earn when they change jobs? In August 2026 the typical job switcher's hourly wage was 5.0 percent higher than a year earlier (3-month average), against 3.6 percent for people who stayed put. On 12-month averages the switching premium was about 2 points at the end of 2022 and 0.8 points in August 2026 (1.4 on the 3-month figure above). With switchers' median pay gains now close to stayers', pay alone is a weaker pull than it was in 2022. The Atlanta Fed counts as a job switcher anyone in a different occupation or industry than a year ago or who changed employers or job duties in the past three months, so the series includes internal moves, not only people who quit. Posting a pay range helps on the hiring side; engagement keeps the people you already have.
What turnover costs
| Cost measure | Figure | Who measured it, how |
|---|---|---|
| Average cost per hire, nonexecutive | $5,475 | SHRM 2025 Benchmarking, 2,371 SHRM members surveyed January 9 to March 3, 2025 |
| Average cost per hire, executive | $35,879 | Same SHRM survey; nearly 7 times the nonexecutive figure |
| Cost of one departure, conservative | 33% of base pay ($16,500 on a $50,000 salary) | Work Institute estimate, 2025 Retention Report |
| Cost of replacing one employee, full range | One-half to two times annual salary | Gallup estimate, 2019 |
| Annual cost of voluntary turnover to U.S. businesses | $1 trillion | Gallup estimate, 2019 |
Source: SHRM, 2025 Benchmarking Reports press release (October 2025); Work Institute, 2025 Retention Report; Gallup, This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion (2019).
The gap between $5,475 and "up to two times salary" is the difference between recruiting invoices and the full cost of a vacancy: lost output, manager time and the replacement's ramp-up. Work Institute's 33 percent is a deliberate floor; Gallup's range is the ceiling for senior roles.
Engagement and turnover
Gallup's Q12 meta-analysis, 11th edition (May 2024), pools 183,806 business units and 3.35 million employees in 90 countries. Between top-quartile and bottom-quartile engagement units, the median difference in turnover is 21 percent in high-turnover organisations (more than 40 percent annualised turnover) and 51 percent in low-turnover organisations (40 percent or less). The same comparison shows 78 percent lower absenteeism and 23 percent higher profitability (Gallup, Q12 Meta-Analysis, 11th edition).
The baseline is weak. In the first half of 2026, 31 percent of U.S. employees were engaged and 18 percent actively disengaged, unchanged from 2025 (Gallup, Employee Engagement Remains Flat as AI Adoption Accelerates, July 2026). Worldwide, engagement fell to 20 percent in 2025, its lowest since 2020, with an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026).
What the data means for small HR teams
- Small employers pay for turnover twice: when someone leaves and while the seat stays empty. In June 2026, 32 percent of small business owners had openings they could not fill and 51 percent (84 percent of those hiring) reported few or no qualified applicants, the highest since September 2024 (NFIB, June 2026 Jobs Report; 405 member firms surveyed through June 29, 2026).
- Benchmark against your industry, not the national 2.0 percent. A restaurant at 3.5 percent monthly quits is normal; a finance team at 3.5 percent has a problem.
- Count first-year exits separately. If they approach Work Institute's 40 percent share, the fix sits in job descriptions, screening and the first 90 days, not in the retention budget.
- Ask before people resign. Gallup's 45 percent with no manager conversation in the last three months is the most actionable number on this page and costs nothing to change.
- Price a departure at 33 percent of salary as a floor when arguing for a raise budget or manager training.
Notes on the data
- JOLTS monthly figures are seasonally adjusted and preliminary for the latest month; annual averages in Table 22 are not seasonally adjusted. The quits rate is quits divided by employment.
- Gallup's U.S. workforce figures come from self-administered web panels of employed adults; the 717-person leaver sample carries a margin of error of plus or minus 5 points.
- Work Institute percentages are the coded first reason from its own exit interviews with clients' departed employees, so the client mix shapes the results.
- Pew's figures describe people who quit in 2021, at the peak of the quits rate, not current shares.
- Cost estimates are not comparable: SHRM reports an average cost per hire from member self-reports, a hiring cost; Work Institute and Gallup estimate the total cost of a vacancy, including lost productivity.
FAQ
What is the current U.S. employee turnover rate? JOLTS does not publish a single turnover rate. The closest measures are the total separations rate, 3.3 percent per month on average in 2025, and the quits rate, 2.0 percent in 2025 and 1.9 percent in July 2026. Over a year those monthly rates add up to separations equal to roughly 40 percent of average employment.
What share of new hires leave in the first year? No government series measures this. Work Institute's exit interview data puts first-year departures at as much as 40 percent of all turnover. The share of a cohort that leaves within a year varies by industry and is best measured in your own HR system.
Is turnover getting better or worse? Quits fell in 2024 and 2025, but layoffs rose and half of workers are watching for or seeking a new job. Turnover is lower because the labor market is slower, not because employees are more satisfied.
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