The average US employee turnover rate was 39.7% in 2025, ranging from 16.5% to 73.5% by industry.

Six in ten exits are people quitting, and one in three is a layoff or discharge.

A separation is any exit from a payroll: someone quits, is laid off, retires or dies. In 2025 the US total was 39.7 per 100 jobs. Of those, 24.0 were quits, meaning people who chose to leave, and 13.4 were layoffs and discharges, the exits an employer starts, from firings to the end of a seasonal job. The small remainder is retirements, transfers between a company's own locations, disability and deaths.

Each rate here is the sum of the twelve monthly rates, which makes it the same kind of number as the annual turnover rate your own company calculates: exits divided by headcount, times 100. The latest single month on file is August 2026, when total separations were 3.2%, quits 1.9% and layoffs and discharges 1.0% (seasonally adjusted, preliminary).

Accommodation and food services turns over nearly four times as fast as state and local government education.

Across the nineteen industries that add up to the whole economy, arts, entertainment, and recreation comes first at 73.5 and state and local government education comes last at 16.5. Accommodation and food services, at 65.3, loses nearly four times as many people per job as state and local government education. Eight industries run above the US average of 39.7 and eleven run below it.

The table below covers every JOLTS industry for every year from 2015 to 2025.

Pick a year, click a heading to sort, or download the same figures as a CSV file. Sector rows such as leisure and hospitality include the industries listed under them.

Three industries lose more people to layoffs and discharges than to quits.

In most industries quits are the larger part of turnover, and accommodation and food services is the clearest case, with 50.8 of its 65.3 coming from quits. The exceptions are arts, entertainment, and recreation (45.3 layoffs and discharges against 26.5 quits), construction (25.0 layoffs and discharges against 21.2 quits), and information (15.7 layoffs and discharges against 15.4 quits). BLS counts the end of a seasonal job as a layoff or discharge, so industries with seasonal staffing show more of them.

Layoffs doubled in 2020, and quits peaked at 33.0 in 2022.

From 2015 to 2019 the US total stayed between 42.4 and 45.0. In 2020 it jumped to 57.0 as layoffs and discharges doubled from 14.4 to 28.8. The Great Resignation looks different: layoffs fell to 11.7 in 2021 while quits climbed to 32.4, then to 33.0 in 2022, the highest of the eleven years. Both have since come back down. Quits were 24.0 in 2025, almost level with 23.8 in 2015, and the 39.7 total is the lowest in the window.

Federal government turnover rose from 12.9 to 21.6 in 2025, the largest one-year jump of any industry.

Most industries moved by a few points in 2025, and the federal government is the exception. Its total separations climbed 8.7 points, quits rose from 6.1 to 9.6, and more than half of the rise sits outside quits and layoffs, in the retirements, transfers and other exits that BLS groups together. At the other end, nondurable goods manufacturing, other services, and real estate and rental and leasing each fell by three points or more.

Restaurant, retail, healthcare and teacher turnover searches each point to a different JOLTS industry.

BLS publishes turnover by industry, not by job title, so there is no separate rate for servers, nurses or teachers. Each search below is answered with the industry that covers those workers.

Accommodation and food services ran at 65.3 in 2025, with quits making up 50.8.

This is the BLS industry behind restaurant turnover rate and hospitality turnover rate searches. It covers hotels and other lodging along with restaurants, caterers and bars. The wider leisure and hospitality row, which adds arts, entertainment, and recreation, ran at 66.5. In 2020 accommodation and food services reached 133.6 as layoffs and discharges hit 79.3.

Retail trade has fallen every year since 2021 and now sits at 45.2.

Retail trade covers stores that sell to the public, from grocery and clothing stores to car dealers. Its total was 64.9 in 2021 and 45.2 in 2025, with quits down from 50.7 to 30.8. It still runs 5.5 above the US average.

Health care and social assistance runs at 34.5, below the US average of 39.7.

This is the BLS industry behind healthcare turnover rate and nursing turnover rate searches. It covers hospitals, doctors' offices, nursing and residential care, and social assistance such as child day care. Quits were 24.3 of the 34.5 and layoffs and discharges only 8.4. The peak came in 2022 at 40.3.

State and local government education runs at 16.5, the lowest of any industry.

This is the closest BLS match for teacher turnover rate searches. It counts everyone who works in public schools, colleges and universities, not teachers alone. Quits were 9.8 and layoffs and discharges 4.3. Private educational services, the other education row, ran at 27.3.

Your own rate belongs next to the row for your industry, not next to the national average.

Count every person who left in the last twelve months, divide by your average headcount, and multiply by 100. The employee turnover rate calculator does the arithmetic and annualizes a month or a quarter. Then find your industry in the table and compare the same kind of number: total separations if you counted every exit, quits if you counted resignations only.

To see what the gap costs, the employee turnover cost calculator turns your rate into dollars a year.

If your rate sits above the row for your industry, the next question is who is likely to leave next. The check below reads the public signs of that for your own team.

Every figure comes from the BLS JOLTS files, and the CSV has all of them.

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), national estimates, retrieved October 19, 2026, with data through August 2026.

Yearly figures use the not seasonally adjusted total separations, quits and layoffs and discharges rate series for each industry, added over the twelve months: for total nonfarm, JTU000000000000000TSR, JTU000000000000000QUR and JTU000000000000000LDR. The latest month uses the seasonally adjusted series, such as JTS000000000000000TSR for total nonfarm, and BLS marks it preliminary. The CSV holds every industry and every year.