Job Vacancies Unchanged

Oregon private employers reported 45,400 job openings at any given time in the second quarter of 2026. This was essentially unchanged from the 45,300 job openings seen in the first quarter of the year, according to new data from the Oregon Employment Department’s Job Vacancy Survey.

In research published today, senior economic analyst Anna Johnson reports that hiring demand remained concentrated in the private health care and social assistance industry, which represented nearly a quarter of all job vacancies. Spring vacancies were distributed across the state, with the Portland Tri-County area accounting for 36% of all vacancies.

Most job openings across the state tended to be for full-time and permanent positions. The average starting wage among this group of vacancies was $26.77 per hour and employers reported 61% of vacancies as difficult to fill.

Each quarter, the Oregon Employment Department surveys private employers from all industries and areas of the state to ask about the job vacancies they are actively trying to fill. Vacancies remained steady from the winter and decreased 11% from spring 2025.

After reaching elevated levels of close to 100,000 job vacancies in spring 2021 through summer 2022 in the rapid hiring following pandemic re-openings, job vacancies across Oregon returned to pre-pandemic levels from 2023 to mid-2025. Spring 2026 levels were slightly lower than levels seen prior to the pandemic in spring 2018 and spring 2019.

In April 2026, there were 7.4 million private-sector job openings in the United States, as measured by the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, and 6.8 million people were unemployed, resulting in a U.S. ratio of about 0.9 unemployed persons per job opening. Over the past year and a half, the U.S. unemployed to job vacancy ratio has been consistently around 1.0.

There were 103,600 unemployed Oregonians in April 2026 and 45,400 job vacancies, resulting in about 2 unemployed persons for every job opening. As job vacancies in Oregon have fallen since the record high peaks and unemployment has been rising, Oregon’s unemployed-to-job vacancy ratio has been generally increasing, in contrast to the flat ratio experienced for the U.S. as a whole.