- Millions of workers left their jobs in what’s known as The Great Resignation.
- Some states are still seeing higher rates of job quitting than others.
- Alaska had the highest quits rate in January at 3.6%.
The COVID-19 pandemic sparked a recognizable shift in working culture in the US, as factors like pay, working conditions, and cost of living prompted millions of workers to quit their jobs in an era appropriately coined The Great Resignation.
But while workers are still quitting — especially in industries like retail trade and leisure and hospitality, USA Today reported —overall, they’re doing so at a much slower rate than they were during the pandemic, in a shift called The Big Stay.
Nick Bunker, the economic research director for North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, told Business Insider in January 2024 that “while employers are still hiring at a healthy rate, the demand for new hires is cooling down. Less demand for new hires means fewer people quitting old jobs to take new ones.”
Less demand for workers can be seen in weaker monthly job openings compared to 2022. The most recent available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows there were 8.9 million job openings in January, higher than pre-pandemic openings but short of the peak in March 2022 when there were over 12 million openings. Additionally, a news release from the BLS noted the number of job openings in January didn’t change much for most states — 39 states — as well as for Washington, DC.
The number of people quitting fell in January by 54,000 to around 3.4 million, per the BLS. A year ago, the number of quits that month was around 3.9 million, representing a decrease in the total US quits rate from 2.5% to 2.1%, the BLS reported.
As seen in the state map above, Alaska kicked off 2024 with a quits rate that was far higher than other states. Here are the 10 states with the highest resignation rates in the country, according to January’s seasonally adjusted data released by the US BLS.
