What Great Resignation? Workers Are Staying Put
Median job tenure in the US was unchanged from early 2020 to early 2022, and it isn’t much different from what it was in the 1960s.
The view of millennials as inveterate job hoppers doesn’t hold up.
Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The past couple of years have been a famously tumultuous time for the US labor market — with the steepest employment losses ever early in the pandemic, a rapid recovery and then a so-called Great Resignation that was more about switching jobs than resigning.
Through all of that, the median number of years that American wage and salary workers have been with the same employer didn’t budge. It was 4.1 years in January 2020, and according to job-tenure data released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics to little fanfare last month, it was 4.1 years in January 2022.