A “Now Hiring” signal at a Journeys retailer within the Brooklyn borough of New York, US, on Tuesday, June 3, 2025.
Adam Gray | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Job openings ticked down in July to levels rarely seen since the Covid pandemic, bolstering fears of cooling within the labor market.
The Job Openings and Labor Turnover report confirmed round 7.18 million listings in July, in accordance to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics launched Wednesday. That’s solely the second studying underneath the 7.2 million stage since the top of 2020.
Wednesday’s print was the bottom since September 2024, when simply over 7.1 million openings had been reported. Outside of that blip decrease final 12 months, these job opening levels had been final seen when the pandemic was inflicting an upheaval of the U.S. financial system and labor drive.
It additionally got here in beneath expectations for 7.4 million openings from economists polled by Dow Jones.
That underscored rising issues of weakening within the labor market, a development that has proven up in anecdotal proof for a number of months.
“This is a turning point for the labor market,” mentioned Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union. “It’s yet another crack.”
“This is yet another data point underscoring how this job market is frozen and it’s difficult for anyone to get a job right now,” Long added.
Weekly jobless claims data due on Thursday will provide the subsequent spherical of perception into the well being of the job market. Then, consideration turns to the carefully adopted jobs report on Friday morning.