There were 7.67 million job openings across the US economy on the last business day of October, the BLS said Tuesday.

The release counts as the most up-to-date set of numbers the agency’s reported since re-opening after the longest US government shutdown in history.

The September JOLTS release was nixed due to the funding lapse. Tuesday’s figures include partial data for that month (self-reported electronically by businesses), as well as data collected last month once the shutdown ended. All data for October was collected in November.

The headline job openings print for October counted as a five-month high. September’s month-to-month gain, 431,000, was the largest in 11 months.

As the figure shows, hires slipped in October after hitting the highest since May the prior month.

It’s hard for me to take this data seriously, and I doubt I’m alone. The BLS had a trust deficit before Trump’s second term, and his actions have exacerbated the situation. The shutdown was insult to injury.

With that caveat, job openings in the retail trade category, at 762,000, were the highest since April of 2023, perhaps suggestive of holiday hiring plans. That said, Challenger’s figures on seasonal hiring tell a different story.

Now to what really mattered from the release. The quit rate fell to just 1.8. As the figure below shows, that’s the lowest since December 2014 if you exclude April and May of 2020 (i.e., excluding the onset of the pandemic).

Total quits, at 2.941 million, were the fewest since March of 2016, again excluding the noise in 2020.

The layoff rate, at 1.2%, matched the highest since 2023 and before that December of 2020. Total layoffs in October were 1.85 million, likewise the highest since early 2023.

Between the uptick in layoffs and the lower quit prints, it’s fair to say this release underscored the notion that the US labor market’s softening, notwithstanding the higher openings headline.