Churn rates — a measure of job-to-job movement among workers within a labor market — are lagging behind job creation, according to a report by CareerBuilder and EMSI released today. The national churn rate fell 23 percent during the recession and remained below pre-recession levels through 2013.

“Churn measures the pulse of hiring activity in an economy,” said CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson. “Low churn rates mean fewer workers are moving to jobs that better utilize their skills, which in turn can lower productivity for companies and stall wage growth for individuals. Through 2013, churn rates in most occupations had not yet recovered significantly, but we expect that to change as workers gain confidence in a labor market that continues to improve and expand.”

The report found the churn rate for all non-farm occupations fell 23 percent during the recession as employed workers were less willing to leave their jobs and employers hesitated to fill vacant positions and increase headcount. With the recovery more than five years underway, churn rates are rising again but remain far below the levels seen prior to 2007.

Key findings include:

• People aren’t hopping from one job to another — at least not like they did during the economy’s pre-recession peak during the mid-2000s. The average churn rate for all non-farm occupations in the years preceding the recession (2003-2006) was 85.6 percent. During the recession, the rate fell or 23 percent to 64.8 percent in 2009. In 2013, the national churn rate stood at 68.1 percent. Of note, the churn rate has fallen in every major occupation group over the last decade.
• Churn rates vary by occupation type. In 2013, architecture and engineering occupations (44.8 percent) and legal occupations (45.1 percent) had the lowest average annual churn rates. At the other end of the spectrum, food preparation and serving related occupations (109.4 percent) and construction and extraction occupations (98.3) had the highest churn rates. While no occupation group has fully recovered from the recession, production occupations and the category including arts, design, entertainment, sports and media occupations saw the strongest rebound in churn rates, each regaining 35 percent of their declines.
• Low-wage occupations tend to have the highest rates of annual churn. For perspective, the occupation with the lowest churn, nuclear power plant operators, had an average annual churn rate of 22.5 percent from 2010 to 2013. Median hourly earnings for this occupation is $37.67 per hour. Meanwhile, fast food cooks, who make $8.88 per hour, had an average churn rate of 113.3 percent.
• Churn rates of IT occupations were, on average, more resilient during the recession and recovered significantly faster than all non-farm occupations. Additionally, the effect of the tech boom is seen clearly in certain occupations and metros. For example, the churn rate of Web developers in the San Jose metro grew from 47 percent in 2003 to 93 percent in 2013.
• The cities with the most severe declines in churn from 2003 to 2013 were North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton, Florida; Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, Virginia; and Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater. All three went from over 110 percent churn in 2003 to just over 70 percent in 2013. Among the 75 most populous, Boston is the only metropolitan area that saw an increase in churn over the last decade. It also had the highest average churn rate from 2010 to 2013, at 87.5 percent — just ahead of Raleigh, N.C. (87.2 percent). Raleigh tied with Bakersfield, Calif., and Indianapolis for the sharpest upticks in churn from 2010 to 2013; each increased 8.3 points.

EMSI calculates the annual churn rate by finding the average of hires and separations in an occupation, then dividing that number by that year’s employment figure. Data on hires and separations comes from EMSI's labor market database, a compilation of more than 90 federal and state employment sources, and is based primarily on the US Census Bureau’s Quarterly Workforce Indicators.