Market Data

The Manufacturing Quits Rate, Explained: What 1.40% Really Tells a Plant Floor

A plain-English guide to the BLS JOLTS quits rate for manufacturing: what it counts, how it is calculated, and why a 1.40% reading is the single cleanest gauge of whether your workers think they can do better elsewhere.

The manufacturing quits rate is 1.40% of employment as of May 2026, meaning roughly 14 of every 1,000 factory workers voluntarily left their job in the latest month, as measured by the BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. It is the labor market's most honest confidence poll: nobody quits a factory job unless they believe something better is within reach.

What counts as a quit, and what doesn't

The calculation is voluntary separations divided by total manufacturing employment, times 100. Only employee-initiated departures count: workers who resigned to take another job, leave the workforce, or move. Layoffs, discharges, retirements, and transfers are tracked separately in JOLTS as other categories of separation, which is what makes quits so clean as a signal, it strips out everything the employer decided and leaves only what the worker chose. BLS collects the figures monthly from a national establishment sample, and because the denominator is total employment, a reading of 1.40% is directly comparable to any point in the series' history back to December 2000.

Manufacturing quits rate, May 2026: 1.40%. Ranged from 1.20% in May 2025 to 1.50% in Nov 2025 across the archived history.

Why it is the cleanest read on worker sentiment

Surveys ask workers whether they are satisfied; the quits rate records what they actually did about it. When workers believe wages are better elsewhere and jobs are easy to get, the rate climbs. When they doubt the market, they stay put even in jobs they dislike, and the rate sinks. That behavioral honesty is why economists treat quits as a tightness gauge and why compensation teams should treat it as a benchmark: the national manufacturing rate, currently holding steady at 1.40%, is the base rate of voluntary attrition your own plant's numbers should be measured against. A plant running well above it has a retention problem that is local, not macro.

Surveys ask workers whether they are satisfied. The quits rate records what they actually did about it.

The cost math at a 1,000-person plant

Translate the rate into money. At the national pace of 1.40%, a 1,000-person plant loses about 14 workers to voluntary quits each month, roughly 168 a year. Using an assumed $28-an-hour wage and the common estimate that replacing an hourly production worker costs about a quarter of annual pay in recruiting, onboarding, and lost output, each quit costs about $14,560. That puts the plant's annual voluntary-turnover bill near $2,446,080, a seven-figure line item generated by a number that looks, at first glance, like rounding error.

Put your headcount, quit count, and wage into the turnover cost calculator to see what voluntary attrition is actually costing your plant each year. Price your own turnover

Published 2026-07-13.