Job Vacancies

Job vacancies, also called job openings, are positions that employers have available and are actively trying to fill by recruiting from outside their organization. Counting them shows how much demand for labor exists, the mirror image of the supply of job seekers measured by unemployment. Statisticians, central banks, investors and recruiters watch vacancy data as an early sign of where hiring, wages and the wider economy are heading.

Vacancies are one half of what labor economists call the matching process. Unemployed people and unfilled jobs can exist together because matching takes time, which is why some frictional unemployment remains even in a strong economy. The relationship between the two is summed up in the Beveridge curve and in the ratio of vacancies to unemployed people, a common measure of labor-market tightness.

Think of a noticeboard at a community center where local businesses pin cards saying "help wanted". The number of cards tells you how many workers employers want right now. If the board is crowded and few people are reading it, employers will struggle to hire and may offer more pay. If the board is nearly empty and a crowd is reading it, job seekers will find it hard to get work.

Official vacancy statistics are a careful count of those cards across a whole country. Comparing them with the number of people looking for work shows which side of the market has the upper hand.

In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) runs the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), which started in December 2000. A job counts as open if a specific position exists, work could start within 30 days, and the employer is actively recruiting from outside the establishment. JOLTS also records hires, quits and layoffs, which feed the quit rate. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) runs a monthly Vacancy Survey of businesses; Eurostat compiles job vacancy statistics for EU countries.

The job openings rate is calculated as:

• $V$ is the number of job openings on the reference day.
• $E$ is the number of people employed.

For example, an economy with 160 million jobs filled and 8 million openings has a vacancy rate of 8 ÷ 168 × 100 ≈ 4.8%. In September 2026, JOLTS reported about 7.5 million US openings, a rate of 4.5%. The ONS estimated UK vacancies at 691,000 for July to September 2026, down 37,000 on the year.

Online job-advert data from recruitment sites give faster, more detailed signals and are increasingly used as real-time economic indicators, but they can count one job several times or include adverts for roles that are not really open.

The Beveridge curve plots the vacancy rate against the unemployment rate. It usually slopes downward: in booms vacancies are high and unemployment low, and in a recession the reverse. A shift of the whole curve outward means more vacancies are needed for any given unemployment rate, a sign that matching has worsened, often linked to structural unemployment.

The ratio of vacancies to unemployed people, often written v/u, measures tightness directly. In 2022 US openings peaked at around 12 million, roughly two for every unemployed person, and UK vacancies passed 1.3 million, a record. Research by Ben Bernanke and Olivier Blanchard found that this tightness was an important driver of wage inflation in 2021 to 2023, alongside energy and food price shocks. Central banks now look at v/u alongside the unemployment rate when judging full employment and the NAIRU, and when reading the Phillips curve.

• Demand for goods and services. When aggregate demand grows, firms need more staff and post more openings, so vacancies move with the business cycle and are a leading indicator of hiring.
• Turnover. When workers quit more often, employers must replace them, adding to openings even without growth.
• Skill shortages. Some roles stay open for long periods because few applicants have the right human capital, as in nursing, engineering and some trades.
• Labor supply. Changes in migration, retirement and economic inactivity affect how quickly openings can be filled.

Vacancy data measure intentions, not actual hiring. A firm may keep an advert open to collect applications, or post "ghost" jobs it is not urgently filling. Survey response rates have fallen in many countries, increasing revisions; the ONS has warned users about volatility in its labor data. Vacancies also say nothing about pay or job quality. For a fuller picture analysts combine them with hires, the quit rate, reservation wages and wage growth.

• US Bureau of Labor Statistics: Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey
• Office for National Statistics: Labour market overview, UK