The typical American worker stays at a job for about 3.9 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over a full career, that adds up to roughly 12 to 13 different jobs between age 18 and retirement. But those numbers mask huge variation depending on your age, your industry, and where you are in your career.
How Long the Average Worker Stays
As of January 2024, the median tenure for U.S. wage and salary workers was 3.9 years with their current employer. Men tended to stay slightly longer at 4.2 years, while women’s median tenure was 3.6 years. About 22 percent of all workers had been with their employer for a year or less, meaning roughly one in five people at any given time is relatively new to their job.
That 3.9-year median doesn’t mean everyone changes jobs every four years on a neat schedule. It’s a snapshot of how long current workers have been in their current role. Some people have been at the same company for 20 years and pull the average up, while others cycle through positions every year or two.
How Many Jobs People Hold in a Lifetime
The BLS tracked a group of people born between 1957 and 1964 and found they held an average of 12.9 jobs from ages 18 to 58. Men averaged 13.1 jobs and women 12.7. In this context, a “job” means any uninterrupted period of work with a single employer, so even a short summer gig counts the same as a decade-long career position.
Much of that job-hopping is front-loaded. Younger workers churn through positions quickly as they figure out their career direction, take entry-level roles, or move for better pay. The pace slows considerably in your 40s and 50s as people settle into roles with more responsibility, better benefits, and higher switching costs like pension accrual or unvested stock.
Age Makes the Biggest Difference
Your age is the single strongest predictor of how long you’ll stay in a job. Workers ages 25 to 34 had a median tenure of just 2.7 years in 2024. By contrast, workers ages 55 to 64 had been with their employer for a median of 9.6 years, and those 65 and older averaged 9.8 years.
This gap isn’t purely generational. Every generation moves around more when they’re young. A 28-year-old trying different industries and chasing raises will naturally have shorter stints than a 58-year-old who found a good fit two decades ago. Younger workers also face fewer consequences for leaving: they’re less likely to have significant retirement benefits tied to one employer, and the pay bump from switching jobs often exceeds what they’d get from an annual raise.
Some Industries Churn Faster Than Others
Professional services, a category that includes consulting firms, accounting firms, and IT services, has the highest turnover rate of any major industry. Tech and media come in second, with a turnover rate around 12.9 percent. Entertainment, accommodation, and retail also run above average, driven largely by frontline workers who face irregular schedules, lower pay, and limited advancement.
Government jobs sit at the opposite end, with a turnover rate of just 8.4 percent compared to an overall average of 10.6 percent. Construction, transportation, and manufacturing also tend to retain workers longer. If you work in a field with strong unions, defined-benefit pensions, or seniority-based pay scales, the incentives favor staying put.
The Current Pace of Job Switching
After the “Great Resignation” of 2021 and 2022, when millions of workers quit voluntarily each month in search of better opportunities, the job-switching pace has cooled significantly. As of early 2025, about 3.0 million workers were quitting their jobs per month, a quit rate of 1.9 percent. That’s well below the peaks of 2021 and 2022, when monthly quits regularly topped 4 million.
A lower quit rate doesn’t mean people are happier at work. It often signals a tighter job market where workers feel less confident about finding something better. When employers are hiring aggressively and competition for talent is fierce, quit rates climb because workers have leverage. When hiring slows, people tend to stay even if they’d prefer to leave.
What This Means for Your Career
If you’ve held three or four jobs in your first decade of working, you’re right in line with national patterns. Changing jobs every two to three years in your 20s and early 30s is common and often financially smart. Research consistently shows that external moves tend to come with larger pay increases than internal promotions, sometimes 10 to 20 percent compared to the typical 3 to 5 percent annual raise.
That calculus shifts as you advance. Senior roles take longer to find, relocation gets harder if you own a home or have kids in school, and benefits like employer retirement contributions or deferred compensation may vest over several years. Many workers naturally transition from frequent moves early on to longer tenures later, which is exactly what the age-based data reflects.
There’s no universally “right” number of job changes. Staying too long in a role where you’re underpaid or not growing can cost you more over a career than the short-term comfort of stability. On the other hand, a resume full of one-year stints can make hiring managers hesitant, particularly for roles that require deep institutional knowledge or long ramp-up times. The pattern that tends to work best is purposeful movement: switching when a role offers meaningfully better pay, skills, or trajectory, and staying when the current position is still delivering on those fronts.