The reliability of one of the Federal Reserve's key labor-market gauges is deteriorating. Roughly one in four businesses approached by the Bureau of Labor Statistics now agree to participate in the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), a response rate near the lowest level since 2022, according to data highlighted by The Kobeissi Letter.
The decline isn't new, but it has been steady. Response rates to JOLTS averaged 58% in summer 2019; by summer 2023 that figure had fallen to 32%, and current readings suggest the slide has continued since. The BLS has acknowledged the trend and has been adjusting its collection methods to try to preserve data quality as fewer employers respond.
JOLTS data feeds directly into how the Federal Reserve reads labor-market slack when setting interest rate policy, and lower response rates widen the margin of error in each monthly release. A survey drawing responses from only a quarter of the businesses sampled produces a noisier signal, one more prone to large revisions in subsequent months as delayed responses trickle in.
Part of a Broader Pattern Across Federal Data
JOLTS isn't alone. Response rates have been sliding across multiple federal statistical surveys for years, a trend the Bureau of Labor Statistics itself tracks and publishes alongside the underlying job-openings figures. Falling participation has become a structural challenge for the agencies markets rely on for real-time economic reads, independent of any single month's headline number.
Why Traders Should Care
For markets, the practical implication is that each JOLTS release should carry a wider error band than it once did. A weak or strong headline job-openings number now reflects a smaller, potentially less representative sample of the labor market than it did five years ago, meaning traders and the Fed alike are increasingly leaning on a data series that is, by the government's own numbers, capturing less of the economy it's meant to measure.
