Median Job Tenure Slips to 3.9 Years

Turnover is easy to count and hard to price. HR teams track how many employees leave each year, but the full cost of those departures is spread across recruiting budgets, overtime, training hours and lost output. Looking at tenure data and replacement costs side by side shows why retention deserves as much attention as hiring.

How long workers stay

The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures job tenure every two years. In January 2024, the median number of years wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was 3.9 years, down from 4.1 years in January 2022.

Tenure varies widely by age. Older workers tend to stay much longer, while workers in their twenties change jobs frequently. It also varies by industry and occupation. Workers in public sector jobs tend to have longer tenure than those in private industry, and tenure is shorter in leisure and hospitality than in manufacturing or utilities.

Short tenure is not always a problem. Some roles are seasonal or designed as entry points. But when experienced employees leave early, employers lose the return on everything they invested in hiring and training them.

What a departure costs

The most direct costs are recruiting expenses. SHRM's 2026 benchmarking data put the median cost per executive hire at $15,000, and costs for skilled and technical roles can be substantial. Advertising, recruiter time, assessments and background checks all add up.

Health care offers some of the clearest data. The 2026 NSI National Health Care Retention and RN Staffing Report estimated that losing one bedside registered nurse costs a hospital about $60,090. Press Ganey estimated the average hospital lost $5.19 million to nurse turnover in 2025. We cover that data in our nurse staffing report.

Then come the costs that do not show up on invoices. Open positions create overtime for remaining workers, who may burn out and leave themselves. Customers wait longer. Quality can slip while new hires learn. Experienced workers spend time training replacements instead of doing their own work.

Knowledge loss matters too. Long-tenured employees know how equipment behaves, which customers need extra attention and how to work around problems. That knowledge rarely appears in manuals and can take years to rebuild.

Why the pressure is rising

The labor market has given workers more options in recent months. Quits rose in September to their highest level since March 2025, according to the BLS, as we reported in our JOLTS analysis. At the same time, many employers are working with modest raise budgets for 2027, which we covered in our salary budget report.

When pay increases are limited, other retention tools become more important. Those include better managers, clear career paths, flexible scheduling and recognition.

Retirements add another layer. In skilled trades and manufacturing, a large share of experienced workers are nearing retirement age, and their departures cannot be prevented, only planned for. Employers that pair senior workers with apprentices or successors years in advance keep more of that knowledge in the building, as we describe in our report on the skilled trades.

Where employers can focus

Start by calculating your own turnover cost. Pick one high-turnover role and add up recruiting costs, onboarding time, training hours, overtime during vacancies and the time it takes a new hire to reach full productivity. The number often surprises leadership and makes the case for investment.

Look closely at the first year. Early departures are common and costly because the employer has spent heavily on hiring and has not yet recovered that investment. A strong onboarding process, described in our guide to the first 90 days, can reduce early exits.

Ask employees what would keep them. Stay interviews, explained in our guide to stay and exit interviews, surface issues before they become resignations. Manager quality is one of the biggest factors, and Gallup research links coaching for managers with higher engagement.

Build career paths. Employees who can see a future with their employer are more likely to stay. Deloitte research has found that workers who believe they can acquire skills important for the future are 2.7 times less likely to leave in the next 12 months. Our report on internal mobility explores how to make those paths visible.

Retention spending often looks like a cost while turnover hides in many separate budgets. When employers add up what departures truly cost, keeping experienced workers almost always proves cheaper than replacing them.