Notwithstanding the 22% of respondents who described jobs as “hard to get” in this month’s Conference Board survey, there are still more open positions than officially unemployed Americans. Or at least there were on the last business day of August.

That’s one way to look at Tuesday’s update on job openings from the outfit formerly known as the world’s preeminent macro statistics agency.

The BLS’s JOLTS release was, for a time, one of the more important macro datapoints on the planet in that it provided investors a way to assess wage-price spiral risk. But that risk hasn’t been on the Fed’s radar in at least three years, and between low response rates and generalized skepticism regarding the veracity of US government data, the JOLTS report’s lucky if it garners any headlines at all these days.

With that in mind, headline job openings fell by more than a quarter of a million to 7.079 million in August from July’s upwardly revised tally. Hires were more or less unchanged.

The openings headline counted as the fewest vacancies since March, but it’s still well off the December 2025 lows. Professional and business services saw the largest month-to-month decline in openings, while the largest increase was in leisure and hospitality.

Layoffs, both the rate and the total, remained low in a historical context, while the quit rate held near the lowest levels in over a decade.

The figure below, updated with Tuesday’s JOLTS headline, shows you the recent history of the so-called “jobs to jobless” ratio.

As the white box shows, that metric’s been 1.0 or higher for five consecutive months, even as August’s reading counts as the lowest of that stretch.

I won’t bother pretending anyone cares about this release, but on the off chance you use it to refine your expectations for the Fed’s next move, it’s dovish at the margins.