US Job Openings Fall Below 10 Million for First Time Since 2021

  • Number of vacancies in February was lower than all estimates
  • Business services, healthcare and transportation openings fell
Lock
This article is for subscribers only.

Vacancies at US employers dropped in February to the lowest since May 2021, suggesting a cooling in labor demand in some industries but still indicative of a job market that’s too tight for the Federal Reserve.

The number of available positions decreased to 9.9 million from a downwardly revised 10.6 million a month earlier, the Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, showed Tuesday. Vacancies were below all estimates in a Bloomberg survey of economists.