Careeronaut pulled the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) for all 11 major industry super-sectors covering January 2022 through the latest available release (March 2026). The picture is starkest in the Information sector — tech, media, publishing — where the quit rate has cratered to 1.1%, down 35.3% from its 2022 peak. Tech workers are now 'job hugging' harder than every industry except government (0.7%) and tied with financial activities and manufacturing.
The pattern across sectors is uniform: ten of eleven industries show double-digit declines in quit rate from the April 2022 peak, with Professional and business services (-47.4%), Manufacturing (-46.2%) and Construction (-43.3%) leading the falls. The lone outlier is the BLS 'Other services' bucket — a catchall covering personal care, repair shops, religious organizations and dry cleaners — where the quit rate has actually risen 12.5% from 2022 levels. Meanwhile Leisure and hospitality still leads the country at a 3.9% quit rate, more than 5 times the government rate and nearly 4 times the Information rate, despite its own steep 29.1% decline from the 2022 peak.
Key numbers
Information (tech, media) quit rate, March 2026
1.1%
Down 35.3% from the 2022 peak — tech workers are now second-tightest job-huggers behind government
Leisure and hospitality quit rate
3.9%
Still the highest of any industry — 3.5x the Information rate, 5.6x government
Government quit rate
0.7%
The lowest of any industry. Public-sector workers stay put more than any other group
Industries where quitting declined since 2022 peak
10of 11
Only the BLS 'Other services' bucket runs against the trend
Largest sector decline: Professional and business services
−47.4%
From 3.8% in April 2022 to 2.0% in March 2026
The outlier: Other services
+12.5%
Personal care, repair, civic and religious organizations — the only sector quitting more than at the 2022 peak
Information sector hire-to-quit gap
+2.3pp
Information is hiring more than 2x the number of workers it loses each month — net momentum despite low voluntary turnover
Professional and business services hire-quit gap
+2.8pp
Largest net-hiring gap of any major sector — the white-collar economy is still adding workers despite reduced churn
Quit rate by industry, March 2026
Tech workers (Information) quit at one-third the rate of hospitality workers. Source: BLS JOLTS series by industry super-sector.
What this means
For tech workers: the playbook has flipped. The same Information sector that powered the 2021-22 'Great Resignation' headlines is now the country's job-huggers, alongside government and finance. Three years of AI-driven layoffs and the sense that 'AI is coming for white-collar work next' have replaced the leverage that fueled record pay raises in 2022.
For hospitality and service-industry workers: leverage hasn't disappeared. With 6.1% of hospitality workers hired in March alone and a quit rate still above pre-pandemic norms, the bottom of the wage ladder is the part of the labor market still rewarding mobility.
For employers: the talent-retention narrative dominant since 2022 needs an industry-by-industry rewrite. The voluntary-attrition crisis is real in hospitality and 'other services' but functionally over in tech, finance, manufacturing and government. Engagement and re-skilling — not retention bonuses — are the bigger problems for the white-collar majority.
For journalists: be careful with averages. Headlines about the 'national quit rate at decade lows' bury enormous industry variance — the gap between the lowest-quit and highest-quit sector is now 3.2 percentage points, roughly the same as the gap between April 2022 (the peak) and today nationally.
“The 'Great Resignation' is over for everyone but hospitality and a handful of service trades. The most-discussed industry of the 2022 resignation wave — tech — has gone in the opposite direction completely. We pulled the BLS data because it felt like every careers piece in 2026 was still talking about the same one national number. Industry-by-industry tells a much more useful story.”
Methodology
Careeronaut pulled the seasonally-adjusted monthly quit rate (BLS JOLTS series JTS{industry}000000000QUR) and hires rate (HIR) for each of the 11 major industry super-sectors plus the national total, covering January 2022 through the latest available BLS release (March 2026 preliminary). Industries follow the BLS JOLTS super-sector classification: Mining and logging, Construction, Manufacturing, Trade transportation and utilities, Information, Financial activities, Professional and business services, Private education and health services, Leisure and hospitality, Other services, and Government.
The 'quit rate' is defined by BLS as voluntary separations (excluding retirements) as a percent of total employment in that month. The 'hires rate' is total hires as a percent of employment in the same month. The hire-to-quit gap (hires rate minus quits rate) is a rough indicator of net hiring momentum in a sector; a gap of zero would mean a sector is replacing leavers exactly, positive means net hiring.
All figures are pulled live from the BLS Public Data API (https://www.bls.gov/jlt/) and are reproducible by anyone with the series IDs.
Caveats: (1) JOLTS is a sample-based survey with sampling variability; the BLS itself recommends focusing on multi-month trends rather than month-to-month moves. (2) The 'Other services' bucket is a catchall that combines a wide range of small sectors (personal care, repair, civic organizations, religious organizations, dry cleaning, etc.) and may have larger variance than other industries. (3) Industry-level seasonally-adjusted series exist for super-sectors only; sub-industry breakdowns require not-seasonally-adjusted data and were not used here. (4) Comparing point-in-time rates against the 2022 peak elevates the apparent decline; readers should weight the multi-year trend, not the headline change from a single past month.
For journalists
The Careeronaut team is happy to share the full methodology, raw data, or run a custom slice of the data for your story.
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