Job Openings by Industry: Why Tech, Healthcare and Education Are Not the Categories You Think

After I wrote about the August JOLTS release, several people asked the same follow-up: fine, but what does it look like by industry? Healthcare, IT, education.

It is a reasonable question and the data exists. The problem is that two of those three are not industries in this dataset, and the third contains more than its name suggests. Read the table literally and you will draw conclusions that are backwards.

So here is the breakdown, and then what the labels actually mean.

The August numbers

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics' job openings and labor turnover release for August 2026, published 29 September. Openings are counted on the last business day of the month; quits cover the whole month. Both are shown as a level and as a rate, and the rate is the one that matters, because it expresses the figure as a share of the people already employed in that industry.

Industry	Openings	Openings rate	Quits	Quits rate
Total, all industries	7,079,000	4.3%	3,066,000	1.9%
Health care and social assistance	1,359,000	5.4%	467,000	2.0%
Professional and business services	1,186,000	5.0%	467,000	2.1%
Government	731,000	3.0%	172,000	0.7%
Private educational services	125,000	3.0%	66,000	1.6%
Information	123,000	4.3%	30,000	1.1%

Now the part that decides whether those numbers help you.

"Information" is not tech

This is the one that trips up the most people, because Information sounds like information technology. It is not.

Information, as a BLS industry, is publishing, telecommunications, broadcasting, motion pictures and sound recording, and data processing and hosting. It is newspapers and phone companies and film studios.

Most software engineers are not in it. They are in professional and business services, under computer systems design, if they work for a consultancy or a software firm that sells to businesses. Or they are counted inside whatever industry employs them: a bank's developers are finance, a hospital's are health care, a retailer's are retail. The industry code follows the employer, not the job.

So Information's 123,000 openings is not the size of the technology job market. It is nowhere close. And the widely repeated reading of a small Information number as proof that tech has collapsed does not follow from this table.

Look at the rate instead, and the picture inverts. Information's openings rate is 4.3%, exactly the same as the economy as a whole. It is a small industry, not a frozen one. The level tells you how big it is. Only the rate tells you how it is behaving.

There is one genuinely interesting number in that row, and it is the quits rate: 1.1%, against 1.9% nationally. Ordinary demand, unusually stuck workers. People in Information are not leaving.

"Education" is two different things, and the bigger one is hidden

Private educational services shows 125,000 openings. That looks tiny for a sector everyone assumes is desperate for staff, and it is tiny, because it is only private education: private schools, universities, tutoring and training companies.

Public school teachers are not in that line. They are inside government, which shows 731,000 openings. Government also contains everything from postal workers to sanitation to the military, so you cannot pull teachers back out of it from this table.

If you are a teacher looking at "educational services" to judge your market, you are reading a number that mostly describes somebody else's employer.

What government does tell you is remarkable on its own terms. Its quits rate is 0.7%, barely a third of the national 1.9%. Almost nobody voluntarily leaves a government job right now. Whether you read that as stability or as a trap depends on which side of the door you are standing.

"Health care" is the one that mostly works, with a caveat

Health care and social assistance is the closest of the three to what people mean when they say it, and the numbers are genuinely strong: 1,359,000 openings at a 5.4% rate, the highest in the table and well above the 4.3% national figure. Demand here is real and it is not an artifact of the category.

The caveat is the second half of the name. Social assistance means child day care, social work, vocational rehabilitation and residential care. Those are real jobs with real openings, and they are not hospital jobs. The category is broader than clinical care.

It is also not nursing. Nursing is an occupation, and occupations sit inside industries rather than alongside them. A nurse employed by a school district is in government. Mixing the two up is the most common error in healthcare hiring coverage, and I have written about which nursing shortage people actually mean separately.

What to do with this

Three practical things.

Use the rate, not the level. A big industry with a mediocre rate has more raw openings than a small industry with a strong one, and the small one may still be the better place to be looking. Health care at 5.4% and government at 3.0% is a real difference in how hard each is hiring. Information at 123,000 versus professional services at 1,186,000 is mostly a difference in how many people work there.

Find your employer's industry, not your job title's. If you write software for an insurance company, the finance numbers describe your market better than any technology figure will.

Pair openings with quits. An industry with high openings and high quits is churning, which means opportunities keep appearing. High openings and low quits means growth without movement. Low openings and low quits, which is government right now, means very few chairs come free at all.

The industry detail does not change the headline from the last release: the market has barely moved in two years. What it does show is that the flatness is not evenly spread, and knowing which category you are actually in is the difference between reading that table as useful and reading it as discouraging.

Figures from the BLS job openings and labor turnover release for August 2026, tables 1 and 4, published 29 September 2026. August data is preliminary. The next release, covering September, is 3 November.