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 notably from 2022's record highs, the worker crunch that plagued many industries for large parts of 2021 and 2022 has eased as well.

According to the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, every industry has seen its job openings rate drop, in many cases significantly, over the past two years. 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 10.5 percent in April 2022 and 8.9 percent in April 2023 to 7.0 percent this April, as the number of job openings in the industry dropped from 1.81 million to 1.26 million over the past 24 months.

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