Oregon’s Labor Leverage Ratio Declines with Steady Quits and More Layoffs

March 09, 2026

With unemployment at a slow and steady climb, the job market continues to loosen. Businesses have less demand to find workers while jobseekers encounter diminished opportunities.

One measure that can shed some light on this is the “Labor Leverage Ratio (LLR)” popularized by economist Aaron Sojourner at the W.E. Upjohn Institute.

The LLR is the ratio between the number of voluntary quits and the number of layoffs or firings. Looking at these two numbers in relation to one another is a proxy for measuring how confident each side of the labor market is – the buyers (employers) and the sellers (workers).The graph above shows the Labor Leverage Ratio in Oregon and the U.S. since 2015 in a three-month moving average to smooth out some of the extremes. Generally, Oregon has tracked closely with the U.S., although Oregon tends to have a higher ratio with more severe fluctuations than the nation. The volatile movement in state estimates is likely related to small sample size, not an actual economic difference.

When the ratio is high, more people are quitting their jobs than are being laid off, signaling that workers are confident they can find employment and businesses are reluctant to lose workers. A ratio of greater than 1.0 is typical, which means in most months more people leave their job by their own choice than are fired. The exceptions are in the depths of recessions like 2009 or 2020, where layoffs spike and quits tend to decline.

In both Oregon and the U.S., the LLR has declined since peaking in 2022. Over the last year, layoffs have slightly increased while quit totals have shown minimal change. Neither trend seems to signal a massive souring of the job market. The resulting picture is more of a continued slow decline in the demand for workers from the previous few years.

As you might expect, the LLR varies quite a bit by industry and state. You can explore differences by industry at the link defining the Labor Leverage Ratio at the beginning of this article. 

The data to create this graph came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Opening and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), which releases data for the U.S., 50 states and D.C., as well as national data by industry. In December 2025, the most recent month of preliminary data, Oregon had an LLR of 2.21, 10th among the states. The three states with the highest LLR were South Dakota (3.60), Missouri (2.77), and Ohio (2.75), while the three lowest states were Idaho (1.21), California (1.20), and New York (1.17).