2000 Employee Tenure — 2000-08-29

The median number of years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer (referred to as employee tenure) was 3.5 years in February 2000, about the same as in February 1998, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported. Although the median years of tenure has been consistantly higher for men than for women, the gap has narrowed in recent years. Information on tenure has been obtained periodically since the early 1950s from supplemental questions in the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly survey of about 50,000 households that provides information on employment, unemployment, earnings, demographics, and other characteristics of the civilian noninstitutional population age 16 and over. The questions on tenure measure how long workers had been with their current employer at the time they were surveyed, not how long they will eventually stay with their employer. The tenure questions that were asked prior to 1983 differ from those asked in more recent surveys.