US job openings rise above 8.1 million in May: JOLTS data

Job openings rose to 8.14 million in the month of May, according to the latest JOLTS data (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, outpacing economist expectations of nearly 7.95 million.

Catalysts Hosts Madison Mills and Brad Smith crunch the number on the fresh labor data, looking to lay off rates and the revision to April’s JOLTS print.

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This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video Transcript

Breaking job openings data here.

US made job openings coming in at 8.14 million.

The estimate here was 7.946 million.

Now we also have a revision prior month coming in at 8.05 million.

That was revised here, So I’m taking a look at that data as we are getting it in.

The revision is 7.9 million.

So a little bit of a vision down here.

Having said that, the broader headline here is a job openings rising over 220,000 to 8.14 million in May from 7.91 million the prior month.

And that May job opening rate is 4.9%.

That is job openings as a percent of total employment plus openings.

That’s coming in at 4.9% versus 4.8 at the prior month.

Interesting, The pace of hiring also had a slight uptick, coming in at 3.6% versus 3.5% also seen layoffs and discharges coming in at 1% in May.

That is on track with what we saw in April.

We also saw 1% so interesting to see Brad.

You can take a look at the market action here, but it is potentially being seen as this broader question we’ve been talking about all morning of when the cracks that were seen in the labour market start to cause an issue, this clearly state showing us that we’re actually seeing a potential return to strengthen job market with more openings here than anticipated.

Yeah, the larger trend line continues to remain intact, at least over the past year and two year, as we’re taking a look at some of the charts within this jolts release here.

One of the things that I continue to look at is where some of these jobs are either being taken off the table or continuing to be put into the mix here.

Now what’s interesting is that the job openings rate, even as you were mentioning that, was a little change.

At 4.9% in May, job openings actually decreased in accommodation and food services.

That was down by about 100 47,000 and then in private educational services.

Perhaps there was a little bit of seasonality in that, but the number of jobs openings increased in a few areas state and local government, excluding education, durable goods manufacturing that was up 97,000.

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Then federal government jobs also added about 37,000 in terms of the openings as well.

So all of these things considered I mean, this is looking back at the month of May.

So, uh, super lag, if you will on this particular figure.

But going forward, there’s gonna be a little bit more focus on that AD P jobs, for instance, that we give Wednesday.