America's best-paid workers are also its least free. We combined three official Bureau of Labor Statistics datasets, quits rates, employee tenure, and earnings, into a single 0–100 score of how locked-in the average employee is in each industry. The result: finance and tech workers quit at roughly one-quarter the rate of hospitality workers, while earning more than three times as much.
Score of 100 = maximum lock-in (rare quits, long tenure, high pay to walk away from). Score of 0 = maximum mobility.
| # | Industry | GHI | Lock-in | Quits/mo (12-mo avg) | Median tenure | Avg annual pay |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Government | 100.0 | Severe | 0.8% | 6.2 yrs | , |
| 2 | Information | 79.8 | Severe | 1.23% | 4.2 yrs | $107,456 |
| 3 | Financial Activities | 78.9 | Severe | 1.24% | 4.7 yrs | $96,151 |
| 4 | Mining and Logging | 76.0 | Severe | 2.17% | 5.7 yrs | $100,946 |
| 5 | Manufacturing | 71.1 | Severe | 1.38% | 4.9 yrs | $77,457 |
| 6 | Construction | 66.2 | Moderate | 1.6% | 4.2 yrs | $85,159 |
| 7 | Professional and Business Services | 54.0 | Moderate | 2.2% | 3.5 yrs | $87,176 |
| 8 | Education and Health Services | 49.4 | Moderate | 1.84% | 3.6 yrs | $61,708 |
| 9 | Trade, Transportation and Utilities | 39.8 | Light | 2.32% | 3.4 yrs | $56,742 |
| 10 | Leisure and Hospitality | 0.0 | Light | 3.87% | 2.1 yrs | $31,210 |
The JOLTS quits rate counts voluntary resignations per 100 employees per month. It is the cleanest available signal of who feels free to leave. In June 2026 the national rate stood at 2.0%, but the spread between industries is enormous.
Financial activities (1.24%) and information (1.23%) post the lowest private-sector quits rates in America, a third of the leisure & hospitality rate (3.87%). Only government (0.8%) is stickier.
This is the "golden" half of the handcuffs. An information-sector employee walking away from $107,456 a year gives up 3.4x what a hospitality worker does, before counting unvested equity, bonuses, and employer health coverage, none of which appear in these figures.
Overall US tenure hit 3.9 years in 2024, the lowest since 2002, yet the quits rate has fallen back to 2.0%. Americans aren't staying because they're satisfied; they're staying because leaving got more expensive and the job market cooled. Economists call it "job lock." Workers call it golden handcuffs.
The industries at the top of this index, finance, tech, energy, are precisely where employees have the most savings, the most skills, and the least freedom. The median finance professional stays 4.7 years and quits at 1.0% a month. Breaking that lock rarely happens by resignation letter. It happens by building an independent income stream before quitting, which is exactly what the growing side-business economy reflects.
A rational response to a 78.9-point lock-in score is not to quit a $96,151 salary cold. It is to quietly diversify income while employed, within the bounds of an employment contract, until the salary is no longer the only thing standing between you and the exit.
The Golden Handcuffs Index measures your industry. The Freedom Number measures you: the exact monthly recurring revenue that makes your salary optional. Calculate it in 60 seconds.
Calculate your Freedom Number →Formula: GHI = 0.40 × Q + 0.30 × T + 0.30 × E, where each pillar is min-max normalized to 0–100 across the ten sectors:
Government is scored on quits and tenure only (weights renormalized to 0.57/0.43) because the CES all-employee earnings series covers the private sector. Trade, Transportation & Utilities tenure is the mean of its two published components (wholesale/retail 3.1 yrs; transportation/utilities 3.7 yrs).
Limitations: Sector averages hide huge within-sector variation (a hospital administrator ≠ a line cook). Earnings exclude equity, bonuses and benefits, meaning the index likely understates lock-in in tech and finance. Tenure data is biennial (next release: early 2027). A 12-month quits average smooths month-to-month noise; the latest single month is also included in the dataset.
Reproducibility: All three inputs are free public BLS series (JOLTS series JTS*QUR, CES series CES*0011, Tenure Table 5). The full computed dataset, including per-pillar normalized scores, is in the CSV/JSON downloads above.
License: CC BY 4.0, reuse freely with attribution and a link back.
Invisible Exit. (2026). The Golden Handcuffs Index 2026: Which industries trap their employees the hardest. https://invisibleexit.com/data/golden-handcuffs-index
The Golden Handcuffs Index (GHI) is a 0-100 composite score measuring how financially and behaviorally 'locked in' the average employee is in each U.S. industry. It combines three pillars from official U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data: how rarely people quit (JOLTS quits rate, 40% weight), how long they stay (median employee tenure, 30% weight), and how much they are paid (average weekly earnings, 30% weight). A higher score means employees are more trapped by the combination of high pay and low mobility.
Government scores 100/100, a quits rate of just 0.8% and a median tenure of 6.2 years, the longest of any sector. Among private industries, Information (79.8) and Financial Activities (78.9) lead: they pay the highest average wages in America ($107,456 and $96,151 a year) while posting the lowest private-sector quits rates (about 1.2% per month).
Three official BLS programs: the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) for seasonally adjusted quits rates through June 2026; the Employee Tenure Summary (January 2024, Table 5) for median years with current employer; and Current Employment Statistics (July 2026) for average weekly earnings of all employees. No proprietary or survey data is used, so anyone can reproduce the index.
The quits rate counts voluntary resignations per 100 employees per month. When pay is high and the perceived cost of leaving is large, unvested equity, bonuses, pensions, seniority, people quit far less often even when disengaged. Finance's 1.0% monthly quits rate versus hospitality's 4.2% is not because bankers are four times happier; it is because the exit price is four times higher. That is the textbook definition of golden handcuffs.
Yes. The full dataset is downloadable as CSV and JSON under a CC BY 4.0 license. Cite 'Invisible Exit, Golden Handcuffs Index 2026' with a link back to this page. The underlying raw series are public BLS data and carry no restrictions.
The index is recomputed when its slowest-moving input refreshes: JOLTS and CES release monthly, and the BLS tenure survey releases every two years (next in early 2027). This edition uses JOLTS June 2026, CES July 2026 (preliminary), and tenure January 2024.