VISIER RESEARCH
Visier Monthly Resignation Report
Visier’s monthly resignation report provides definitive insight into the labor market behavior that impacts your business. Explore the rates for your industry and identify which populations are driving employee mobility.
Monthly resignation rate, USA
- Resignation rate
Resignation rate by industry group
- USA, current
- USA, 12 months earlier
Resignation rate by tenure
- USA, current
- USA, 12 months earlier
Resignation rate by age
- USA, current
- USA, 12 months earlier
Resignation rate by gender
- USA, current
- USA, 12 months earlier
Resignation rate by manager status
- USA, current
- USA, 12 months earlier
What’s happening here…
Insight 1 of 3
September brought a retreat in U.S. resignations, with the overall rate dropping from 1.7% in August to 1.1%, just above the 1% recorded a year earlier. Among industries, High Tech led at 1.3% and posted the largest annual increase, at 0.2 percentage points, and Manufacturing followed with a 0.2-point rise to 1%. Retail, Wholesale, Transportation, and Warehousing reached 1.1%, while Financial, Insurance, and Real Estate registered the lowest rate at 0.9%.
The overall decline of resignations mirrors the late-summer slowdown seen in the previous two years, even as each industry’s rate remained above its September 2025 level.
First-year employees remained the most mobile tenure group in September, resigning at 2.1%, an increase of 0.1 percentage points over last year, versus 0.4% for employees with at least 15 years of service. The youngest tracked age group, employees aged 20–25, also had the highest rate at 2.3%, although this was 0.1 percentage points below September 2025. Modest declines extended to employees aged 25–35, contrasting with small increases across most age groups above 35.
These results highlight a distinction: resignations rose among the newest hires but eased among younger workers, despite both groups retaining comparatively high rates.
The divide between managers and non-managers persisted, while resignation rates by gender converged. Non-managers left at a rate of 1.2% in September, compared with 0.4% for managers; both rates increased by 0.1 percentage points year over year. Women’s resignation rate stood at 1%, marginally above men’s 0.9%, with a narrower difference than a year ago.
Non-managers therefore continued to resign at nearly three times the rate of managers, whereas the gender gap had diminished to just 0.02 percentage points.
About our Data
Resignation rates are curated from Visier Community Data. Our database contains 23 million employee records from more than 22,000 companies. The companies included in our analyses represent a wide range of industries, including Healthcare, Technology, Financial Services and Insurance, Energy, and Manufacturing. Weighted averages account for different headcounts per each organization.
What defines resignations?
A resignation is an employee event whereby an individual formally gives up their position in a company, and voluntarily ends their contract with their employer. Typically people resign to move to a different employer or some other form of work, e.g. self-employment. Resignations do not include retirements.
The resignation rate measures the percentage of the working population that chose to leave their current employer during a specific period of time. If the number of total employees = 100, and there is one exit per month, it results in a 1% resignation rate.
Why should you care?
Losing an employee through resignation can be costly for organizations. Lost productivity, time to source, hire, and onboard a replacement, as well as the loss of the departing employees’ institutional knowledge and professional networks lead to substantial direct and indirect costs. The average cost to replace a knowledge worker is 1.5x their annual salary.
In addition, changes in rates of resignation, especially when they are different to the overall market, can provide early indication of performance or other business challenges in a specific geography or department.
How to use resignation rate insights
Monitoring the resignation trends in the overall market provides an important context for the people decisions made by your business. Increasing overall rates lead to an increasing volume of new opportunities, which may cause your own people to resign. Decreasing rates can indicate a level of employee uncertainty or caution which can then show up in the overall results for a specific industry sector.
The most value comes from being able to monitor your own rates relative to the market, and identifying how market changes impact the dynamics within your employee population. Through this strategic approach you can better position your business to proactively retain the people that make you successful.