Fewer new faces

One in five American wage and salary workers walked through their employer’s front door within the past year. Four years ago, it was nearly one in four.

Those figures come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employee Tenure Summary, released September 24, 2026 and drawn from a supplement to the January 2026 Current Population Survey of about 60,000 households. The survey runs every two years, so every number here describes January 2026.

The front door is narrower

The share of wage and salary workers with a year or less at their current employer fell to 20.6 percent in January 2026, from 22.2 percent in January 2024 and about 24 percent in January 2022. BLS counts three groups in that share: new hires, job losers who found new work during the year, and people who voluntarily changed employers. Every route into a new job runs through the same door, and the door narrowed.

Rising tenure is not loyalty

Median employee tenure rose to 4.1 years, up from 3.9 in January 2024. That is not a peak. It returns the figure to its January 2020 and January 2022 level after the 2024 dip, and 2016 and 2018 stood higher, at 4.2.

Rising tenure reads like commitment. It may not be. When hiring slows, the workforce is increasingly made of the people already in it, and the median climbs on its own. The BLS technical note allows for this: in periods of declining job security, median tenure can rise if less-senior workers are more likely to lose their jobs. That note is a general caveat, not a verdict on this release. Paired with a shrinking new-hire share, though, the slowdown reading is the more plausible one.

The gaps underneath

Age drives the spread. Workers 55 to 64 have a median of 9.6 years, more than three times the 3.0 years of workers 25 to 34. Among workers 16 to 19, 74.1 percent have a year or less of tenure; among workers 55 to 64, 9.2 percent do.

The public sector holds people longer, 5.6 years against 3.9 in private industry. Within the private sector, leisure and hospitality sits lowest at 2.4 years and financial activities highest at 5.0. Men’s median rose to 4.3 years from 4.2. Women’s rose to 4.0 from 3.6, the larger move.

What the survey cannot see

The figures are self-reported. They cover only people who were employed in January 2026, exclude the self-employed, and say nothing directly about people looking for work. By publication day, the data were eight months old.

CoBlack keeps a search running against openings drawn from employer career pages and ATS feeds. Tenure rose in the same two years that fewer workers were new to their employer. For anyone looking for work, the second number is the one that matters.