Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey

The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) is the Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly measure of US labour market flow, tracking job openings, hires, and separations across the nonfarm economy. Its February 2026 data, released March 2026, recorded a 3.1% hiring rate — the lowest since April 2020 at the onset of the pandemic. That reading became the starting point for Stanford Digital Economy Lab's April 2026 analysis, which applied the 0.6 percentage point decline from the 2023 baseline to the 158.6 million nonfarm workforce and calculated that AI is suppressing roughly 950,000 to 1 million annual hires.

JOLTS is distinct from the headline unemployment rate: it measures flows, not stocks. A declining hiring rate shows that employers are hiring less frequently without necessarily cutting existing staff — the dominant pattern Stanford identifies as the primary AI displacement channel. By contrast, Challenger, Gray & Christmas tracks declared redundancies, which represent the visible surface of displacement. The 34-to-1 ratio Stanford derives from these two sources is the gap between what is visible and what is happening.

JOLTS data is released with a roughly six-week lag, so the February 2026 figure became part of the April 2026 policy debate. The same week BLS published JOLTS, the agency skipped its scheduled GenAI workplace report — leaving JOLTS as the primary federal input to the AI displacement argument while withdrawing the direct measurement policymakers had been waiting for.