Job openings across the US economy mostly reversed the largest gain of 2025 in June, government data released on Tuesday showed.
The 275,000 month-to-month decline pushed the JOLTS headline down to 7.437 million, a touch below consensus. The breakdown showed openings in the private sector contracted by 325,000. Open government positions, by contrast, rose 50,000, attributable entirely (and then some) to state and local education.
The tallies from this release are as of the last business day of June. You’ll recall that the July jobs report was bolstered by state and local government hiring, which outstripped job creation in the private sector for the first time since October.
The chart below shows you openings in state and local government positions along with those in the private sector. The former — 791,000 — is the most since August of 2024. The latter — 6.551 million — is low in the post-pandemic context (but not by pre-2018 standards), and in line with where that series stood in the two years leading into COVID.
There are a couple of caveats. The underlying series are pretty noisy in the JOLTS dataset, and that visual uses a double y-axis with the scales adjusted for maximum contrast (it’s not a chart crime if you preemptively cop to it).
Also notable: The big spike in accommodation and food services vacancies from the May JOLTS release reversed entirely in Tuesday’s update, even as hires in that category fell from the prior month.
Some observers attributed May’s big jump in open positions across restaurants, hotels and the like to Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Maybe the spike was a seasonal blip.
As the figure shows, the drop in openings on the accommodation and food services line was the largest on record.
Running quickly through the rest of the numbers, overall hires slipped to 5.204 million in June. That was the fewest in a year, the second-fewest since April of 2020 and, if you exclude the plunge associated with the original COVID lockdowns, the second-fewest since May of 2016. Quits fell to 3.142 million, the fewest this year (the quit rate was steady at 2) and layoffs remained very low.
All in all, I’d suggest this release can be described as the July jobs report from another angle. Openings in the private sector were relatively subdued, vacancies in state and local government were up and even if the economy’s seen slowing, employers are still reluctant to let anybody go.
The openings to officially-counted unemployed ratio, which the Fed monitors fairly closely, slipped to 1.06 from 1.07 in May, indicative of “balance.”
Make of it all what you will.
