Working Lives / January 2024 · A Data Story
A Short Job History Depends On Your Age.
A year at one employer means something different near the start of a career. Before treating a short stint as a warning sign, look at how common it is among workers of the same age.
Move Through The Age Groups ↓had been with their current employer for 12 months or less.
How Long Workers Have Been With Their Employer
U.S. wage and salary workers · January 2024 · Percent of each age group
Time With The Current Employer
Each step is a different age group in the same January 2024 survey—not the same people getting older. The scale stays fixed.
January 2024 · ~33,359,000 wage and salary workers in this age group, a population estimate—not the survey sample. Published shares total 100.0%.
Groups cover different lengths of time; these are category shares, not a density histogram. ~ marks survey estimates. Dashes remain unknown; rounded shares may not add to 100%.
02 / What Stands Out
A Recent Start Isn’t Unusual.
Among workers aged 25–34, ~28.1% had been with their employer for a year or less. Among those aged 55–64, it was ~9.6%. A screening rule that ignores age and career stage loses that context.
This Is Not A Job-Hopping Score.
The survey measures time with the current employer. It doesn’t say how many jobs someone has had, why they moved, how well they perform, or whether they intend to leave. These group summaries are context, not a rule for screening people by age.
Check The Numbers
Download Data ↓Open The Data Table
| ≤12 Months | ~28.1% |
|---|---|
| 13–23 Months | ~9.6% |
| 2 Years | ~9.4% |
| 3–4 Years | ~24.6% |
| 5–9 Years | ~22.5% |
| 10–14 Years | ~5.4% |
| 15–19 Years | ~0.4% |
| 20+ Years | — |
Sources & Method
The values are the Total (all sexes) age rows in BLS Employee Tenure in 2024, Table 3. We retain all seven non-overlapping age groups and all eight tenure categories. The underlying January 2024 CPS supplement covers wage and salary workers aged 16+ in the civilian noninstitutional population; self-employed people are excluded.
The worker counts shown below the slider are weighted population estimates in thousands, not numbers of survey respondents. Age-group population estimates sum to ~143.718 million; the published all-age total is ~143.719 million. The 1,000-worker difference is rounding, not a dropped age group.
BLS uses a dash for no data or values that do not meet publication criteria, including bases below 75,000. We preserve that distinction rather than filling the chart with zeros. No suppressed bucket counts are reconstructed from rounded percentages.
The official BLS page was retrieved through a public text proxy because the direct endpoint rejected automated requests. Values were cross-checked against the BLS table. This is a cross-sectional comparison, not evidence that age causes tenure or a forecast of a person’s behavior.
Source files retrieved 2026-09-09. The download includes source links, file fingerprints and every chart value. Analysis and visualization: HRaizon.