US JOLTS Job Openings: 2026 Schedule, Dates and What to Expect

The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, universally shortened to JOLTS, is the monthly count of unfilled jobs in the United States. It is published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), part of the Department of Labor, and it measures something the headline jobs report does not: how much demand for workers employers actually have. The next release covers July 2026 and is scheduled for Tuesday, September 1, 2026 at 10:00 am ET (3:00 pm London, 4:00 pm Frankfurt, 11:00 pm Hong Kong). Full schedule and background: US JOLTS job openings dates. Every confirmed date on this page is available as an ICS download and Google Calendar feed, so the release lands in your own diary with the correct time zone conversion.

JOLTS arrives with a lag of roughly two months, which makes it less explosive than payrolls, but it is closely watched by the Federal Reserve because it shows whether the labour market is cooling through fewer vacancies or through outright job losses. The most recent published reading, for June 2026, put job openings at 7.36 million, a rate of 4.4% of total employment plus openings.

2026 schedule

The dates below are the confirmed JOLTS release dates on our calendar for the remainder of 2026. BLS publishes JOLTS monthly, usually in the first few days of the month, at 10:00 am ET. Dates not yet listed here are confirmed by BLS in its annual release schedule and added as soon as they are published.

Note the clock change: releases up to late October are at 10:00 am EDT (3:00 pm London), while the November and December releases are at 10:00 am EST. Because the UK and the euro area put their clocks back a week earlier than the United States, the London equivalent stays at 2:00 pm or 3:00 pm depending on the exact week, so check the calendar entry rather than assuming.

What is the JOLTS report?

JOLTS is a survey of about 16,000 non-farm business and government establishments across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Each month those employers report four things: how many positions were open and unfilled on the last business day of the month, how many people they hired during the month, how many quit voluntarily, and how many were laid off or discharged.

That structure makes JOLTS a picture of labour demand and of worker confidence at the same time. Job openings show how many jobs employers want to fill. The quits rate, the share of employed people who chose to leave, is a rough measure of how confident workers feel about finding something better: people rarely resign in a weak market. The layoffs and discharges figure shows whether firms are actively shedding staff, which is the difference between a labour market that is slowing gently and one that is cracking.

Two derived numbers get most of the attention from economists. The first is the job openings rate, openings as a percentage of employment plus openings, which was 4.4% in June 2026. The second is the ratio of vacancies to unemployed people, calculated by dividing JOLTS openings by the number of unemployed from the monthly household survey. When that ratio is well above 1, there are more advertised jobs than jobseekers and wage pressure tends to build. When it falls below 1, jobseekers are competing for a shrinking pool of vacancies.

JOLTS became a headline release rather than a specialist one during the 2021 to 2023 period, when openings surged to record highs above 12 million and then fell steadily. It gained prominence partly because former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen highlighted it, and because Fed officials argued that inflation could fall if excess vacancies, rather than jobs themselves, were eliminated.

How is it calculated?

BLS collects the JOLTS sample by establishment, meaning an individual workplace rather than a whole company, stratified by region, industry and size. A job opening counts only if the position exists, work could start within 30 days, and the employer is actively recruiting from outside the establishment. Internal transfers, promotions and positions to be filled by recalling laid-off staff are excluded, which is why JOLTS openings are usually lower than counts from job boards.

Because new businesses take about a year to appear on the sampling frame, BLS adds an estimate from a birth and death model that projects the hiring and separations of very new and very short-lived establishments, using data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. JOLTS estimates are also benchmarked each month to employment levels from the Current Employment Statistics survey, the same programme behind the monthly payrolls figure.

Revisions matter more in JOLTS than in most indicators. Each release revises the previous month as late reports arrive and seasonal factors are recalculated: in the June 2026 release, May job openings were revised down by 57,000 to 7.5 million, while hires and total separations were both revised up. Once a year, with the January data, BLS revises the whole seasonally adjusted history to incorporate updated employment benchmarks and new seasonal factors. Response rates to JOLTS have fallen over the past decade, which widens the margin of error and is one reason economists prefer to look at three-month trends rather than a single month.

What time is it released and where?

JOLTS is released at 10:00 am Eastern Time, which is 3:00 pm in London and 4:00 pm in central Europe during US daylight saving time, and 3:00 pm London or 4:00 pm Frankfurt shifting by an hour around the autumn clock changes. In Asia the release lands after the Tokyo and Hong Kong cash sessions have closed, so Asian markets react the following morning.

The data go out on the BLS website at bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm, with the full PDF, the detailed industry tables and the historical series available from the JOLTS home page. BLS also lists the latest headline values on its JOLTS latest numbers page. There is no lock-up press briefing as there is for some releases: the numbers hit the public website and newswires simultaneously at 10:00 am, which is why the reaction in Treasury futures and the dollar is instant.

One timing quirk: 10:00 am ET is 90 minutes after the New York equity open, so unlike the 8:30 am jobs report, JOLTS hits a market that is already trading. That tends to produce a visible intraday move in stock index futures and short-dated Treasury yields rather than a gap at the open.

Recent data

The table below shows the readings BLS has published during 2026, as first reported in each news release. Figures are seasonally adjusted and subject to revision.

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS news releases and news release archive. The complete monthly series back to December 2000 is available from the BLS database and from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis under the code JTSJOL.

The pattern in the first half of 2026 is worth understanding before the next release. Openings sat close to 6.9 million in February and March, then jumped to roughly 7.6 million in April and May, driven in the April data by a 668,000 rise in professional and business services vacancies, before easing to 7.36 million in June. That swing is a reminder that single monthly JOLTS prints are volatile and often revised.

What is the consensus forecast?

For the September 1, 2026 release, covering July 2026 data, a consensus forecast has not yet been published. Consensus estimates for JOLTS are usually collected by Reuters, Bloomberg and Dow Jones in the week before the release, so a median figure typically appears only a few days ahead. Until then, the useful anchor is the prior reading of 7.36 million openings in June 2026 and the recent range of roughly 6.9 million to 7.6 million.

When the consensus does appear, note that JOLTS has a history of surprising in both directions: the April 2026 figure came in around 800,000 above the expected level. Large misses are more common in this series than in payrolls because of the survey’s lower response rate and the volatility of individual industry categories.

How do markets react?

JOLTS moves markets through one channel above all others: what it implies for Federal Reserve interest rate policy. A basis point, or bp, is one hundredth of a percentage point, so a 25bp cut is a quarter-point reduction in the Fed’s target range.

A stronger than expected openings figure suggests employers still want to hire, which supports wage growth and makes it harder for the Fed to justify cutting rates quickly. The typical reaction is higher two-year Treasury yields, a firmer dollar, and fewer cuts priced into the futures curve tracked by the CME FedWatch tool. Equities can go either way: good news for growth, bad news for the discount rate applied to future company earnings.

A weaker figure, especially if it comes with a falling quits rate and rising layoffs, does the opposite: short-dated yields fall, the dollar softens, gold often gains, and rate-sensitive parts of the equity market such as small caps and property trusts tend to outperform. Because layoffs are the component that signals genuine labour market deterioration, a rise there usually produces a bigger move than an equivalent fall in openings.

The spillover is global. Because the dollar is on one side of most currency trades, a hawkish JOLTS surprise, meaning one that argues for tighter policy, typically pushes sterling and the euro lower against the dollar and lifts UK gilt and German bund yields in sympathy. Asian markets, trading after the release, often open the following session with the move already priced in. Emerging market currencies and commodity prices are sensitive to the same dollar channel.

One caveat that experienced traders apply: JOLTS covers a month that has already been described by two payrolls reports and one CPI report, so the information is partly stale. It tends to matter most when it either confirms or contradicts a fresh narrative about the labour market, and least when it simply repeats what payrolls already showed.

What It Means for Your Money

JOLTS is not a number that changes your bank balance on the day, but the trend in job openings feeds directly into decisions that do.

• Mortgages. US fixed mortgage rates track long-term Treasury yields, which move on expectations for Fed policy. A run of weak JOLTS reports that brings rate cuts closer tends to pull mortgage rates down. In the UK, fixed-rate mortgage pricing follows swap rates, which are influenced by global bond yields, so a large US labour market surprise can nudge UK deal pricing within days.
• Savings rates. Savings and money market returns follow central bank rates with a lag. If job openings fall persistently and the Fed cuts, the interest paid on cash accounts falls too. Fixing a rate while it is high is the practical response for savers who do not need instant access.
• Jobs and pay. This is the most direct channel. Fewer vacancies means less bargaining power when you ask for a pay rise or change employer, and longer job searches. A falling quits rate is a signal that fewer people are confident enough to move, which historically coincides with slower wage growth.
• Prices. Wage growth is a major input into services inflation. A cooling labour market reduces the pressure on prices for things like restaurant meals, insurance and healthcare, though the effect takes many months to show up in your shopping.
• Pensions and investments. Global equity and bond funds react to US rate expectations, so JOLTS is one of several data points that move the value of a workplace pension. The sensible framing is that a single monthly release should not change a long-term investment plan.
• The pound, dollar and euro. A strong US labour market usually strengthens the dollar, which makes travel to the United States more expensive for UK and European holidaymakers and raises the sterling cost of dollar-priced goods, from fuel to imported electronics.

Related economic events

• US Jobs Report: the monthly non-farm payrolls and unemployment rate release, published two days after JOLTS in some months and the single biggest labour market event on the calendar.
• US CPI Report: the consumer price index, the main inflation gauge and the other half of the Fed’s dual mandate.
• US PCE Report: personal consumption expenditures, the inflation measure the Fed formally targets.
• US GDP Report: quarterly output growth, which sets the context for how much hiring the economy can sustain.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is the next JOLTS report?

The next JOLTS release is on Tuesday, September 1, 2026, covering July 2026 data, followed by confirmed releases on November 3 and December 1, 2026.

What time is the JOLTS report released?

At 10:00 am Eastern Time, which is 3:00 pm in London and 4:00 pm in central Europe during US daylight saving time. The November and December 2026 releases are at 10:00 am EST.

How often is JOLTS published?

Monthly, usually in the first few days of the month, with data referring to a month roughly two months earlier. The July 2026 data, for example, are published on September 1, 2026.

Where can I find the official JOLTS release?

On the Bureau of Labor Statistics website at bls.gov/jlt, where the news release, the full data tables and the historical series are all free to access at the moment of publication.

How does JOLTS affect interest rates?

The Federal Reserve treats job openings, quits and layoffs as evidence of how tight the labour market is. Persistently falling openings and rising layoffs strengthen the case for rate cuts, while strong openings argue for holding rates higher for longer.