After several years of job openings vastly outnumbering the number of unemployed people in the U.S., creating a job market in which workers could dictate terms, the balance of power appears to be shifting back to employers. In August 2025, the number of job openings per job seeker fell below 1 for the first time since March 2021, as the unemployment level continues to creep up from its historic post-pandemic lows.
For now, the U.S. labor market remains broadly in balance, however. According to the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), 7.67 million positions remained unfilled on the last business day of October, while 7.83 million were unemployed in November. Due to the shutdown, there is no unemployment data for October, but we can assume the number would have been somewhere between the 7.60 million reported for September and the November figure.
This means there is still roughly one unfilled positions for every job seeker, indicating that the imbalance between labor demand and supply, identified by the Fed as one of the factors that drove inflation in 2022 and 2023, has disappeared while unemployment is still not at a level that would make the alarm bells go off. Before the pandemic hit in March 2020, there had been 1.2 job openings per unemployed person in an already tight labor market. That indicator then crashed to 0.2 by April 2020 amid mass layoffs in sectors affected by Covid restrictions before climbing as high as 2.02 job openings per unemployed person in March 2022, at the height of the "Great Resignation".
During the inflation crisis, Fed chairman Jerome Powell repeatedly stressed that the labor market needed to balance out to relieve upward pressure on wages and thus cool inflation. Earlier this year, he too acknowledged that balance had been restored and that labor market conditions were no longer a likely source of inflationary pressures. Quite the opposite indeed, as the Fed is now evidently more concerned about where the labor market is headed than it is about inflation.
