How long people stay in a job
The typical American worker has been with their current employer for about four years. Young workers move far more often; workers near retirement often stay for a decade or more.
The idea of a job for life belongs to a particular moment in the twentieth century, and even then it described fewer workers than people remember. Today, most working lives are a sequence of jobs. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics measures how long people have been with their current employer every two years.
The numbers
In January 2026, the median wage and salary worker had been with their current employer for 4.1 years. Tenure rises steeply with age:
- workers aged 25 to 34 had a median tenure of 3.0 years;
- workers aged 55 to 64 had a median tenure of 9.6 years, more than three times as long.
About 30% of workers aged 25 and over had been with their employer for ten years or more. Among workers in their late fifties and early sixties, around half had.
There is little difference between men and women overall: a median of 4.3 years for men and 4.0 for women.
Why young workers move
Short tenure early in a career is not a sign that something is wrong. Young workers move because moving usually pays. Changing jobs is the main way most people get large pay rises in their twenties and early thirties, and it is how they find out what kind of work suits them. Economists describe the first decade of a career as job shopping: trying several matches before settling on a good one.
By middle age the picture reverses. People have found work that fits, they have built up seniority, pensions and skills specific to their employer, and moving costs more than it gains. Staying becomes the better bet.
The price of staying, and of leaving
Both choices have costs, and they show up at different times.
- Staying builds trust, seniority and often pension rights. It can also mean pay falling behind what the same work earns elsewhere, and skills that are worth less if the employer ever lets you go.
- Leaving usually pays more in the short run, and widens a person’s network and skills. It also restarts the clock: new colleagues, new probation, and sometimes a pension that has not vested.
A forced move is a different thing altogether. Workers who lose a long-held job in a layoff often take years to recover their previous pay, and some never do. The same move, made by choice from a position of strength, can be the best decision of a career.
Questions people ask
Is job-hopping bad for a career? Frequent moves early in a career are normal and usually pay. Very short stays repeated over many years can worry employers, who wonder whether a new hire will stay long enough to be worth training.
Do people stay longer in the public sector? Yes. In the BLS figures, government workers typically have much longer tenure than private-sector workers, partly because of the jobs themselves and partly because public-sector workers tend to be older.
How often do people change careers, not just jobs? It is common, but harder to measure, because there is no single definition of a career change. Many workers make at least one large change of field during their working lives, often in their thirties or forties.
In One Life
Work in One Life is a career with a name — nurse, software engineer, electrician, teacher — played as a chain of decisions. “Do you chase the promotion?” and later “Do you change careers?” are Life Questions, and between them are the everyday choices that make up a working life: the late night to finish the job, the colleague you cover for, the offer from somewhere else, the boss you finally answer back.
Seniority, pay and job security build up the way they do in the world, and so does what they cost: the hours, the stress and the time they take from the people at home. The game keeps the record of every job a life held, and the end of the life shows how much of it the work was.