Fewer Positions Left Unfilled in Cooling U.S. Labor Market

As the U.S. labor market is slowly cooling off and job openings have come down from last year's record highs, the worker crunch that plagued many industries for large parts of 2021 and 2022 is beginning to ease as well.

According to the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, all but two industries saw their job openings rate drop, in many cases significantly, from July 2022 to July 2023. The leisure and hospitality sector for example, the industry most affected by the post-pandemic worker crunch, saw its job openings rate, i.e. the share of jobs in a given industry left unfilled at the end of the month, drop from 8.9 percent to 6.9 percent over the past 12 months, as the number of job openings dropped from 1.55 million in July 2022 to 1.34 million last month.

The following chart shows which industries had the highest job openings rate at the end of July and how the situation has changed over the past twelve months. The job openings rate is the number of job openings divided by all jobs, filled or unfilled, in a given industry.