Line
Job Openings vs. Unemployed Workers
U.S. job openings and number of unemployed people, monthly, thousands
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
Job openings from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey; unemployed people from the Current Population Survey. Both seasonally adjusted.
How many jobs are waiting for each person looking for one. When the openings line sits above the unemployed line, there are more vacancies than job seekers and employers compete for workers; for most of the record it was the other way round.
What this chart reads
- JOLTS Job Openingsas “Job openings”behindlatest 2026-08-01
- U.S. Number of Unemployed Peopleas “Unemployed people”latest 2026-09-01
Sources
JOLTS Job Openings. Source: The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes this series monthly through the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Palanor pulls the data nightly from the FRED API at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
U.S. Number of Unemployed People. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, series LNS13000000 (FRED id UNEMPLOY). Palanor pulls it from the FRED API (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) nightly. Bureau of Labor Statistics data are in the public domain.
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.