Is anyone staying anywhere any more?

This piece started from something we linked in Signals. Josh Bersin's argument that workers and employers have been quietly decoupling for sixty years assembles a striking set of figures: the median tenure of a company in the S&P 500 has gone from twelve or thirteen years in the 1970s to four or five, the average American worker now experiences 2.5 layoffs in a career, and trust in company leadership sits at 19 percent.

The direction is right. But those figures measure how long companies last, and a public series measures how long people stay. We went to it. Median US job tenure is 3.9 years, down 0.7 in a decade, and most of that fall is the age mix of the workforce.

Median tenure fell 0.7 years in a decade, to 3.9

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys employee tenure every two years. In January 2024, median tenure with a current employer across all wage and salary workers was 3.9 years. The release notes that this is the lowest since January 2002.

That is a fall of 0.7 years over a decade, about 15 percent. It is real and consistent. It is also much less dramatic than the language usually attached to it.

The phrase "lowest since January 2002" does quiet work in that release. It means tenure was at or below today's level before 2002, in the era the loyalty story treats as the good old days. Whatever happened to job tenure, it was not a straight line down from a golden age.

Within each age group, tenure barely moved

We lined up the six releases by age group. Split that way, the picture changes shape.

Younger workers lost 0.3 years over the decade. Older workers lost 0.8. Both changes are small. The gap between the two groups is 6.9 years, and it dominates the table.

A 28-year-old cannot have fifteen years of tenure. So the headline figure largely measures who is in the workforce, and it moves when the age mix moves. Reading a change in it as a change in how people feel about their employers credits to culture what demographics mostly explain.

Sector works the same way. Median tenure in the public sector is 6.2 years against 3.5 in the private sector. An economy shifting employment between the two will move the national median without a single person changing their mind about anything.

Two more splits from the same release: men are at 4.2 years and women at 3.6, both down from 4.3 and 3.8 in 2022.

The fall is real, slow and general

Nothing here says tenure is stable. Every cell in the table falls. The shortening is gradual and broad-based, spread across ages, with no sudden generational break.

The series says nothing about why anyone left. Tenure is a stock measure. A 3.9-year median fits a healthy market where people move for better work, and it fits a miserable one where they move to escape. The series cannot tell them apart. Bersin's argument is about the second reading, and the tenure data neither confirms nor refutes it.

The mechanism has to come from other evidence. The strongest finding on timing is from Rubenstein and colleagues, who pooled 117 studies and report a correlation of −0.27 between tenure and voluntary turnover. People who quit tend to do it early. That describes the shape of the risk rather than its level, and it is more actionable than the national median. It is the subject of where the leaving risk sits.

Age structure sets most of an organisation's median

A retention case built on "tenure is collapsing" rests on a figure that fell 15 percent in a decade, mostly for compositional reasons, from a level that was lower twenty years earlier. Anyone who looks up the series can take it apart.

The age structure holds up, because it is real and it sits in an organisation's own headcount data. A workforce with a large share of people aged 25 to 34 will have a median tenure somewhere near 2.7 years whatever it does. What matters then is which departures within it the organisation minds. The split between turnover it chose and turnover it did not is the one with evidence behind it, set out in what a departure costs.

The series is US only, self-reported, and stops at January 2024

The BLS series is a household survey supplement, so tenure is self-reported and the coverage is the United States only. Eurostat and the OECD publish European comparisons, but they are constructed differently and are not directly comparable, which is why this piece does not mix them.

The two-year interval means the most recent reading is January 2024. The next survey covers January 2026 and had not been published when this was written. It will add one point to the series. It will still not say why anyone left.

Common questions

What is the average length of time people stay in a job? In the United States, median tenure with a current employer was 3.9 years in January 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Medians are used rather than averages because a small number of very long tenures distort the mean.

Is job tenure falling? Gradually. The median fell from 4.6 years in 2014 to 3.9 in 2024, about 15 percent over a decade, and the January 2024 figure is the lowest since January 2002.

Do younger workers change jobs more often? Considerably. Median tenure is 2.7 years for 25 to 34 year olds and 9.6 years for 55 to 64 year olds. Some of that is behaviour and much of it is arithmetic: a younger worker cannot have accumulated a long tenure.

Is the decline a generational change in loyalty? The data does not support that reading. Within each age group the change over a decade is a fraction of a year, and the national median was at or below today's level before 2002. Much of the aggregate movement reflects the age and sector mix of the workforce.

Does tenure differ by sector? Yes, substantially. Median tenure is 6.2 years in the public sector and 3.5 years in the private sector.

Does short tenure mean an organisation has a problem? Not on its own. Tenure is a stock measure that cannot distinguish people leaving for better work from people leaving to escape, and it is heavily determined by the age profile of the workforce.

Where does the risk of someone leaving concentrate? Early. A meta-analysis of 117 studies finds a correlation of −0.27 between tenure and voluntary turnover, meaning those who quit tend to do so earlier in their time with an employer.

Sources

1. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employee Tenure Summary, January 2024
2. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employee Tenure Table 1: median years of tenure with current employer by age and sex
3. Rubenstein, Eberly, Lee & Mitchell (2018), Surveying the forest: a meta-analysis of the antecedents of voluntary employee turnover, Personnel Psychology 71(1), 23-65
4. Josh Bersin, The Great Decoupling: How Workers Became Disconnected From Companies