Key points:
- The share of part-time job postings has climbed since 2022, while full-time postings have remained flat.
- The rise in part-time opportunities is broad-based, covering most sectors across the labor market.
- Employers are swapping full-time postings for part-time in most sectors.
Employers are showing a clear and enduring openness to offering more part-time work. Whether out of competitive necessity to attract workers in a still-tight market with the promise of additional flexibility, and/or out of economic necessity as the economy cools and fewer worker hours are needed, the upshot for workers is clear: More part-time roles are available for those that desire or require them.
The current state of job postings schedules
Full-time work is, by far, the most common schedule type offered by employers in job postings. As of May 2024, 62.3% of all job postings were for specifically full-time roles. Part-time postings represented just 31.7% of postings, up 2.5 percentage points from May 2022. Additionally, job postings in which employers are keeping their options open, indicating both full-time and part-time, account for 12.7% of postings. Overtly flexible schedule types including “choose your own hours,” “rotational shift,” and “after school” were also explored for this research, but are used too infrequently for reliable analysis.
From January 2022 to May 2024, the share of job postings advertising only full-time work stayed largely flat, while the share of postings specifying both full-time and part-time rose briefly in 2022. This suggests employers expanded options for job seekers when the labor market was especially tight during the early pandemic recovery, before returning to historic norms as the market loosened over the past couple of years.
But the share of postings explicitly for part-time workers rose beginning in early 2022 and has largely remained at an elevated level roughly 10% above pre-2022 norms ever since. This could mean that employers are determining it remains necessary to offer more flexible work arrangements to meet employee demand. It could also be a sign that employers are pulling back on the amount of hours they require from employees as the labor market continues to cool.
Full-time and part-time postings by sector
The distribution of full-time and part-time job postings across the labor market is largely unsurprising. Predominantly full-time sectors include traditional office jobs such as Insurance, Legal, and Accounting, as well as Childcare and Construction. Most sectors that dominate the top of the part-time list are service-related, with Sports a notable exception.
The increase in the share of part-time jobs is rather broad-based, with part-time options growing for the vast majority of sectors across the labor market. The share of postings noting a part-time option for Beauty & Wellness jobs rose by 26.8 percentage points over the past two years, the largest such change observed in this analysis, followed by a mix of service and corporate roles that have also gained more flexibility. Sectors with the largest drops in their share of part-time jobs include a handful of healthcare-related occupations, including Veterinary, Childcare, and Dental.
Are employers trading full-time for part-time?
In some sectors, the growth in part-time options has come at the expense of full-time job postings. There are a few sectors in which full-time job postings are increasing while the share of part-time postings has decreased, including Management and Food Preparation & Service (shown in the lower-right quadrant of the plot below). But the lion’s share of sectors show the opposite trend — the share of part-time jobs has grown, while the share of full-time roles has declined (the upper-left quadrant of the plot). Some of the sectors where employers are most actively switching to part-time job postings include Media & Communications, Hospitality & Tourism, and Marketing.
Conclusion
The specific drivers of the trend towards more part-time work — including the possibility that employers are offering more-flexible options to attract workers, and/or that a cooling labor market simply requires fewer full-time roles — are difficult to discern and were not examined in this analysis. The labor market is likely to continue to cool and rebalance in the coming year, and these trends will be an important indicator of employers’ ongoing responses to changing labor market dynamics. The rise in part-time trends may continue if and as employer demand for workers continues to slowly fade in an uncertain economy.
Methodology
We track scheduling trends by tallying US job postings on Indeed that feature either full-time, part-time, or both, in the job description as of May 2024. Data is not adjusted for seasonality but is adjusted for changes in job title mix by weighting according to 2019 composition. The share of overall job postings that are ‘full-time’, part-time, or both, exceeds 100% because job postings that feature both also count in the other categories.
In the scatterplot showing the change in the share of part-time and full-time job postings by sector, the trends are viewed as a share of only job postings that indicate some schedule type, thereby excluding the possibility of employers just choosing not to specify a schedule for the role.
