Your low turnover might be hiding job huggers

The share of US workers who quit held between 1.9 and 2.0 percent every month from May through July 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over the same stretch, job openings stayed above seven million. For an employer, a quit rate that low reads as stability.

What sits underneath it

The label for one possible explanation is job hugging: staying in a role because the market feels too risky to leave. A ResumeBuilder survey from February 2026 found that 57 percent of US workers identify as job huggers, up from 45 percent the previous August. That's a self-applied label from one vendor's survey, so hold it loosely. It points the same direction as the BLS series: with millions of openings posted and very few people moving toward them, workers appear to be treating the job they have as the safest one available.

The staying carries a cost for them too. Research from Resume Now, reported by Fortune in January 2026, found that 58 percent of people name staying in a bad job too long as their biggest career regret, against 38 percent who regret quitting. That's another vendor survey, so the same caution applies, but it suggests the people hugging their jobs aren't necessarily at peace with the choice.

What a quit rate can't tell you

A quit rate counts exits. It can't tell you who in the building wants to be there. Two teams can post identical turnover and have very different mornings, one made of people who chose to stay and one made of people waiting for a better offer. On the dashboard the two look the same, and the difference only surfaces when the market loosens and the second team starts to leave.

Korn Ferry's reporting on the trend warns that the calm may not hold, and that companies that make no effort to keep today's job huggers could find themselves short of top talent once conditions change.

What it means for hiring

A new hire walks into whatever the team already feels like. In a market where staying is the default, retention numbers stop separating the people who are committed from the people who are cornered, and a company that judges its hires by who stayed gets very little information from the result. A hire who is still there at 12 months may be thriving or may be waiting out the market, and the record shows the same thing either way.

That changes what is worth asking at the hiring stage. Whether someone can do the job, and whether they will still be around in a year, are the easy questions. Whether they will want to be there is harder, and it depends on the team, the manager, and the work itself. Wanting to stay is one of the conditions we look at, because lasting a year and wanting to last a year can come apart in a market like this one.

The takeaway

Low turnover is a fact about the market, and the BLS data shows it clearly. Whether the people inside want to be there is a separate question, and no quit-rate dashboard answers it.