12 States With Highest Job Resignation Rates: 2022

As the U.S. economy emerges from COVID restrictions, millions of Americans are quitting their jobs each month, a phenomenon dubbed the “great resignation.”

Two main factors are driving this surge, according to a recent report from WalletHub, a personal finance website: incentives available for changing jobs and a desire to leave careers hit hardest by the pandemic.

WalletHub found that the rate at which workers quit their jobs differs across the country. In New York, for example, the job-leaving rate in May and over the preceding 12 months was roughly half of that in states with the highest rates.

To rank states and the District of Columbia on the frequency of workers leaving their places of employment, researchers considered the rates in the latest month and the last 12 months, using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. They then used those metrics to rank-order the resignation rates from highest to lowest.

See the gallery for WalletHub’s 12 states with the highest resignation rates, along with job openings and unemployment rates, also based on BLS data as reported by the Society for Human Resource Management.