September 11, 2006 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)

Employee tenure, 2006

The proportion of all wage and salary workers who have worked for their current employer less than 1 year is about the same as the proportion who have been employed by their current employer 10 years or more.

[Chart data—TXT]

About 24 percent of wage and salary workers age 16 and over had 12 months or less of tenure with their current employer in January 2006. These short-tenured workers include new entrants and reentrants to the labor force, job losers who found new jobs during the previous year, and workers who had voluntarily changed employers during the previous year. As would be expected, younger workers are more likely than older workers to have short tenure.

The proportion of all wage and salary workers age 16 and over with at least 10 years of tenure with their current employer was 26 percent in January 2006. As would be expected, a larger percentage of older workers than younger workers had 10 or more years of tenure.

These data are from the Current Population Survey. To learn more about how long workers have held their current jobs, see "Employee Tenure in 2006," (PDF) (TXT) news release USDL 06-1563. Information on employee tenure has been obtained from supplemental questions in the Current Population Survey every 2 years since 1996.