Job openings slid in March to sit near a four-year low as the labor market continued to cool.
New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed 7.19 million jobs open at the end of March, a decrease from the 7.48 million seen in February. Job openings in March hit their lowest level since September 2024 and were near levels not seen since December 2020. The data comes as investors closely watch for any signs that economic growth may be slowing further.
The February figure was revised lower from the 7.57 million open jobs initially reported. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had expected Tuesday’s report to show 7.5 million openings in March.
“The March JOLTS report showed some cooling of labor-market conditions, but it wasn’t weak enough to bring forward our rate-cut expectations as the Federal Reserve will be monitoring the impact of tariffs on inflation,” Oxford Economics lead US economist Nancy Vanden Houten wrote in a note to clients.
The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) also showed that 5.4 million hires were made during the month, up slightly from the 5.37 million made during February. The hiring rate held flat at 3.4%. Also in Tuesday’s report, the quits rate, a sign of confidence among workers, moved up slightly to 2.1% from 2%.
Both the hiring and quits rates are hovering near decade lows.
Meanwhile, the ratio of job openings to unemployed workers fell to 1.02% in March, a new low since the post-pandemic labor market recovery began.
“The hiring rate remains stuck at relatively low levels, which is usually consistent with a higher level of unemployment, but a low pace of layoffs is holding down the unemployment rate for now,” Vanden Houten added.
Tuesday’s data comes as economists and consumers have grown increasingly concerned about the outlook for the US economy amid President Trump’s tariff escalation. In a survey released on Tuesday, 32.1% of consumers told the Conference Board they expected jobs to be “hard to get'” in the next six months, up from 28.8% in March.
“Notably, the share of consumers expecting fewer jobs in the next six months (32.1%) was nearly as high as in April 2009, in the middle of the Great Recession,” Stephanie Guichard, a senior economist of global indicators at the Conference Board, said in the release. “In addition, expectations about future income prospects turned clearly negative for the first time in five years, suggesting that concerns about the economy have now spread to consumers worrying about their own personal situations.”
