We had to do a double take when the BLS reported today's JOLTS job openings: with consensus expecting no change from last month's print of 6.866MM, and near the lowest in two years, moments ago a flashing red headline revealed that in April the US added a stunning 731K jobs to 7.618 million, up from an upward revised 6.887 million, and up 520K from a year ago.
For context, this was a 9 sigma beat to expectations, the biggest beat in history.
WTF!?... and how is this possible at a time when companies are mass laying off thanks to AI? Well, according to the BLS,the number of job openings increased in professional and business services (+668,000), and also rose in manufacturing, manufacturing, and - alas - government. Jobs stumbled in finance and insurance (-135,000).
This was the biggest monthly increase in professional and business services by a huge margin. It wasn't clear what exactly job category prompted this surge.
Meanwhile, the draining of the swamp appears to be officially over with government jobs jumping by 47K to 777K, the biggest monthly increase this year.
The historic surge in April job openings, coupled with the modest increase in unemployed workers means that after 9 months of labor surplus, there were 245K more job openings than unemployed workers in April, a reversal to the "deficit" regime observed since last July.
The surge in openings also means that after falling back to 0.9x in March, in April the ratio of job openings rose back to 1.0x and was the highest since January 2025.
But while the job openings number was a shock, this month we saw a reversal of last month's surge in hires and quits, and in April both the number of Quits and Hires, tumbled once more. Specifically, hires plunged by 419K to 4.899 million, while quits - or the "take his job and shove it" indicator - plunged by 183K, or 5.8%, to 2.977 million, the lowest since 2020 and the biggest percentage drop since April 2025, as Americans are suddenly allergic to leaving their jobs on their own.
It goes without saying that a surge in job openings even as nobody is leaving their jobs, leads one to scratch their head just what is going on here, besides data massaging of course.
In any case, since this hires number feeds directly into the payrolls calculations (after netting out separations) this explains why the April payrolls report slumped to 115K from 185K in March.
Overall, this was a shockingly strong JOLTS report - so strong in fact one wonders who at the BLS had a fat finger incident when calculating the professional and business services job openings, and shows that after some significant weakness in late 2025, US labor market has continued to stabilize in early 2026. Of course, the report also lags the payrolls report by a month, which is why it gives us little insight into what Friday's jobs report will be.