Key Points:
- Indeed Hiring Lab’s new measure of labor market tightness tracks how tight or slack labor markets are in 800+ US metropolitan and micropolitan areas.
- California and the Southeast appear most slack for opposite reasons: too little tech demand in one, and a supply mismatch in the other.
- The tightest markets are in New England and the Upper Midwest, where aging, shrinking workforces are thinning the supply of available workers.
The US labor market has cooled since early 2022, but the slowdown has not been evenly felt nationwide. Juneau, Alaska, has roughly twice as many job postings today as it did in early 2020, while Los Angeles and Denver were each hit harder and now have almost 20% fewer postings over the same period. There is clearly a wide range of labor market experiences across the country, shaped not just by the kind of work someone does, but also by where they do it.
Indeed Hiring Lab’s new measure of labor market tightness directly quantifies those geographic gaps, ranking how tight or slack the labor markets are in some 800+ metropolitan and micropolitan areas relative to the nation as a whole. It offers a clearer picture of where job seekers are more likely to struggle to find work, and where employers are more likely to struggle to find workers. As a general pattern, local markets in New England and the Upper Midwest lean tighter than the nation as a whole — demand for workers is high relative to the supply of available workers — while coastal California and the Southeast currently lean slacker, but for very different reasons.
Understanding the difference between tight and slack labor markets
In general, a tight labor market is one where employers have a harder time finding workers, often giving workers more bargaining power and making it easier for them to land a job. A slack labor market is the reverse: Employers can fill roles more easily, and job seekers have less leverage and may face some difficulties landing a job.
Whether a local market feels tight or slack comes down to a simple tension: The number of people looking for work versus the number of openings waiting to be filled. A market looks slack when workers outnumber openings, and there are two ways to get there. Openings can dry up when employers turn hesitant and postings grow scarce, resulting in declining labor demand. Conversely, the supply of labor can swell, so that every posting draws a long line of applicants. In the case of declining demand or growing supply (all else equal), employers can afford to be selective, and competition among job seekers grows.
A market tightens when the balance flips and openings outnumber available workers. Sometimes that’s driven by increased labor demand and a resulting boom in hiring. Sometimes it’s led by a declining supply of workers, driven by factors including a small or aging population, outmigration, and/or a mismatch between available jobs and the number of people who want or are trained to do that work. When openings are hard to fill, employers compete with each other for hires, workers gain bargaining power, and wages tend to rise.
Measuring labor market tightness
Judging whether a market is tight or slack means looking at it from the perspectives of both job seekers and employers. As the world’s largest matching platform for the two groups, Indeed sits on both sides of the hiring equation. Our tightness measure draws on real-time data from every US metropolitan and micropolitan area capturing the level of job seeker interest each local job posting attracts (clicks, applications, and seekers per job); how intensely job seekers are searching (how many jobs they’re applying to and/or how often they search); how concentrated hiring is across employers and occupations; and how hard employers work to promote their openings (the share of postings that Indeed is paid to display and/or that offer remote work options).
This analysis combined more than a dozen Indeed metrics to create a snapshot of conditions in May 2026. A Tightness Index value of 100 means a region is roughly as tight as the US labor market overall. But because the national market has grown slacker in recent years, a reading above 100 doesn’t necessarily mean that finding a job is easy, just that it is easier than in some other similar geographies. In other words, the Index is best read as a map of where work is easiest and hardest to find right now.
Where is work hardest to find right now?
The Tightness Index shows that some of the slackest areas in spring 2026 were in California and the Southeast, two regions rarely mentioned in the same breath when discussing labor markets. Both appear slack in Indeed’s data, but for opposite reasons. In California’s tech-heavy labor market, demand for workers has pulled back sharply, even as job seekers continue to chase those roles, leading to labor market slack. In the South, postings have held up better, but the composition of that demand looks very different from that in the rest of the country.
Southern hiring skews toward the in-person, consumer-facing, and skilled-trades work that has held up best since 2022. In May 2026, Food Preparation and Service made up 9.5% of the South’s unique postings, compared to an average of 7.9% across the rest of the nation. Installation and Maintenance roles are also more abundant in the Southeast, accounting for 7.1% of postings, above the 6.4% outside the South. In contrast, Software Development jobs represented just 1.9% of postings in the Southeast versus 3.1% in the rest of the country, with demand for science and engineering workers similarly low. The result is two slack markets that look nothing alike: One with too little demand to meet a steady supply of tech talent (locally and remotely), the other where steady demand for in-person work may not match the jobs local job seekers actually want or the jobs they are trained to do.
Where is it easiest to find a job right now?
The tightest areas in May 2026 sat in the opposite corner of the map, across New England and the Upper Midwest. The Lebanon-Claremont micropolitan area straddling New Hampshire and Vermont topped the list of geographies with the tightest labor market (at an index of 148.3), followed by the Duluth, Minn., metro area (143.5).
These places sit hundreds of miles apart and run on different industries, but their tightness traces back to similar sources. The Indeed Job Posting Index in both areas has held up better than the country as a whole. Lebanon-Claremont sat 3.8% above its pre-pandemic level at the end of May and Duluth 2.1% above, against just 0.4% nationally. But that gap is modest, and it isn’t enough on its own to explain local readings that far exceed 100, suggesting that the pressure is coming from the other side of the equation, a relatively thinner supply of workers.
Lebanon-Claremont straddles the Connecticut River between New Hampshire and Vermont, states tied as the second-oldest in the country by median age, behind only Maine. Workers 55 and older made up roughly 30% of New Hampshire’s workforce as of early 2024, compared to 23.1% nationally. With a higher share of Baby Boomers retiring or working their final years before retirement, the active pool of job seekers is thinning, putting an already-visible strain on local employers. Duluth tells the same story: its labor force peaked around mid-2009 and has been shrinking since.
What these markets are living now, the rest of the country is heading toward. Hiring Lab’s own 15-year projection expects the national labor force to shrink in the coming years, as accelerating baby boomer retirements and slowing immigration pull workers out faster than new ones arrive. In other words, the tightness showing up today in aging corners of New England and the Upper Midwest is an early look at a demographic squeeze the whole country will likely soon start to feel.
Conclusion
The national headline describes an average that almost no one actually lives in. A labor market that has “cooled” can mean a near-frozen search in one area of the country and more opportunities in another at the very same time. This new measure is built to make that distance visible, turning one national number into 800+ local ones. It reflects who is looking for work, where openings are, and a demographic shift that is increasingly thinning the workforce from the top. For anyone deciding where to look for work or where to go looking for workers, the answer depends on where you’re standing. The map just makes it easier to see.
Methodology
The Indeed Tightness Index distills 13 proprietary Indeed measures of job seeker and employer signals into four dimensions using principal components analysis (PCA). The four dimensions included job-seeker engagement per posting, employer paid effort, per-seeker search intensity, and market/occupational concentration. Job-seeker engagement per posting was weighted at 40% in the index, while the other three components were weighted at an even 20% each. Index values were calculated for all 924 US metropolitan and micropolitan areas, but 96 were removed from publication for failing to clear a minimum posting-volume threshold in May 2026. Signals are transformed where appropriate, standardized as z-scores across that universe, and signed so higher always means tighter. Statistical areas with thin postings were shrunk toward the national median. It is built entirely on Indeed proprietary data (job postings, clicks, and applications) and anchored so that 100 represents the U.S. labor market as a whole, with higher scores tighter and lower slacker.