Inside the labor numbers of the August PYMNTS Consumer Expectations Index is a tale of two American workers. Picture them, each drawn from the averages of their occupation.
The first works in an office, somewhere in administration, management, accounting or finance. She’s confident she will still have her job a year from now, and she doubts she could find another in the current market with a similar salary if she lost it. The index scores both beliefs from 0 to 100, where 50 is neutral. She reads 81.2 on keeping her job and 45.6 on finding another one, below the neutral line. Tenure and seniority have priced her above what the open job market would pay her today, which is exactly what makes her income so hard to match. Her security and her trap are the same fact.
The second writes software. He’s watched three years of layoff cycles roll through his industry and doesn’t assume he’ll be spared in the next one. He reads 74.1 on keeping his job, the lowest score of any occupation the index measures and 57.9 on finding another one, the highest. He expects churn. But he also expects to land.
Same month, same economy, same 4.1% unemployment rate. Two completely different ideas about what it means to have a job, and no official statistic can tell them apart. One of them is why the kitchen renovation is on hold this year, and it is not the one the layoff headlines would suggest.
Two questions hiding inside one number
The PYMNTS Consumer Expectations Index is a monthly survey of roughly 2,400 U.S. consumers that asks 11 questions about how households expect their finances, the economy and their jobs to go. The index scores answers from 0 to 100, with 50 being neutral. The overall index reads 54.8 in August and has now spent 11 straight months in a channel between 53 and 57. Amid the turbulence and repeated calls for a recession, consumers never crumbled, but they never surged either.
That steady average has an E-shaped economy underneath it: three lines stacked by financial lifestyle and separating as they go. Consumers who do not live paycheck to paycheck are drifting up. Those who live paycheck to paycheck without issues paying their bills sit in the middle and are slowly eroding. Consumers who live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to pay bills have been below neutral in every month of the series. The three groups’ expectations are pulling apart: The gap between the top and bottom lines is 2.2 points wider than it was last October.
Finding the separation beneath a stable average is this index’s signature move, and the E-shape is only its first application. The second is the job market. The 11 questions group into three areas, and the one covering jobs, called Labor Market Security, is the strongest at 66.6, as it has been in every month of the series. Whatever else consumers have doubted this year, they have not doubted their jobs. But that 66.6 is an average of two beliefs that have almost nothing to do with each other.
Job security is stronger than confidence in the market
Ask American workers whether they will still have their job in a year, and they are among the most confident people this index measures. That question scores 80.6. Ask the same workers whether they could find a new job or new clients at the income they need, and the score drops to 49.1, below neutral. The distance between keeping and replacing is 31.5 points, the widest gap between any two labor dimensions in the index, and it has never been narrower than 29 points in 11 months of measurement.
Confidence in the job and confidence in the market for that job turn out to be separate things, and only one of them has ever cleared neutral. Still, even that one is softening. Personal job security climbed through the spring to a peak of 85.6 in May, then posted its sharpest one-month drop in July. August won back some ground, to 80.6, which still leaves it 5.0 points below the peak. The index’s strongest signal has started to soften. And last week the jobs report showed the economy shedding 23,000 jobs while the unemployment rate sat at 4.1%. This is the month to go inside the index’s strongest number.
The tradeoff runs backward
Cut the August survey responses by occupation, and those two workers turn out to be the ends of a pattern. The survey sorts respondents into eight groups: office-based roles; high-skill technical work; healthcare; education; manual and physically demanding work; customer-facing retail and service; non-customer-facing retail and service, such as drivers and warehouse workers; and an all-other category. Across those groups, the relationship is inverted. Broadly, the occupations most confident about keeping their jobs are the least confident about replacing them.
That’s the finding that should stop people. The assumption is that security and options travel together. That a good job is good in both directions. But in this job market, they pull against each other, because the same tenure that makes a worker hard to replace makes their income hard to match.
The office worker anchors one end of the pattern, and she has company. Customer-facing retail, service and education workers both score high on keeping their jobs and below neutral on their odds of finding something comparable elsewhere. Only one of the eight occupation groups clears the neutral line on replacing income by a meaningful margin. Most of the employed population is some version of her: safe in the seat, unconvinced about the exits.
The software engineer holds the opposite expectation, and he holds it alone. High-skill technical workers post the only mobility score meaningfully higher than neutral, and the layoff cycles behind their last-place security score are the reason the expectation exists. Technical workers assume more turnover and less consequence from it. Office workers assume neither.
What stuck workers say about the current job market
Workers who feel stuck can explain themselves. Among workers and job seekers who said replacing their income would be difficult, 42.9% cite few openings in their field or area, 37.5% say the available work pays less than they need and 32.7% believe employers are unlikely to hire someone like them because of age, an employment gap or something similar.
That last reason carries a generational edge, and it doesn’t run in only one direction.
Among stuck workers and seekers, 59.7% of baby boomers and seniors point to age or an employment gap. Among millennials, 14.8% do. But Generation Z comes in at 32.4%, more than double the millennial rate, so this is not a simple age ladder. It’s a wall with two sides, and millennials are the only generation in which fewer than one in five stuck workers run into it.
Older workers doubt they would be chosen. More than half of stuck baby boomers and seniors name age or a gap, and they are the generation least likely to blame a shortage of openings in the job market. Gen Z describes an entry problem instead. Their most common barrier is a lack of job openings in their field, at 50.1%, the highest of any generation. They name a skills or experience mismatch at a rate roughly 50% higher than Gen X. The oldest workers believe the door will not open for them. The youngest are finding fewer doors, and the ones that exist ask for experience they haven’t yet been allowed to earn.
The payroll ledger says the same thing
Last week’s official data describes the current job market from the other side. Beyond July’s payroll decline, the two prior months were revised down by a combined 103,000. Yet the Labor Department’s June Job Openings and Labor (JOLT) report, the official count of hiring, quitting and layoffs, showed a layoff rate of 1.1%, among the lowest on record. Companies are not cutting workers loose; they’re just not taking on new ones. The hiring rate held at 3.4%, near its post-2020 lows.
The quit rate stayed frozen at 2.0%. That one is the official measure closest to our job mobility dimension, because people quit only when they believe there’s something better out there for them. It has not moved. Even the wage data rhymes. Average hourly earnings growth slipped to 3.2% in July, the slowest since May 2021, while 37.5% of our stuck workers say the jobs that exist pay less than they need.
Economists call this a low-hire, low-fire job market. Our respondents call it safe but stuck. It’s the same market, measured once from the payroll ledger and once from the kitchen table.
The price of a job you cannot replace
The cost of losing a job is the likelihood of the loss times how hard the income is to replace, and mobility sets the second half. The office worker’s odds of losing her job are low, but her cost would be enormous. The engineer’s odds are higher, and his cost is small. She’s the one whose kitchen renovation is on hold.
Businesses keep describing a puzzle: secure employees who spend like nervous ones. It stops being a puzzle the moment keeping and replacing are measured separately. A worker who is confident about her job and doubts a replacement exists in the current job market at her pay will behave cautiously anyway. Long commitments get avoided. Big purchases wait. Precautionary saving looks rational even in a month when layoffs make no headlines.
Which is why a jobs report with few changes reads as reassurance in Washington and confirmation at the kitchen table. The PYMNTS Consumer Expectations Index measures keeping and replacing separately every month, because the distance between them is where the difference between a stable consumer and a spending one lives.
About the Index
The PYMNTS Consumer Expectations Index is a monthly, survey-based measure of U.S. consumer financial expectations, scored 0 to 100 with 50 as neutral, built from 11 dimensions spanning household finances, the macroeconomic and buying climate and job market security, read across three financial lifestyles. Personal job security measures perceived likelihood of keeping one’s job or main clients over the next 12 months; job mobility measures perceived ease of finding a new job or clients at the required income in the current job market.
Methodology
The August 2026 wave was fielded August 4-10, 2026, to approximately 2,400 U.S. consumers and completed by 2,759 respondents. All survey figures, including sample-level and occupation-level dimension scores and mobility-reason shares, are from the official weighted series. The mobility-reason base comprises all respondents eligible for the job mobility item who said that replacing their income would be difficult, including unemployed job seekers. Official labor figures are from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: The Employment Situation—July 2026, released August 7, 2026, and Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey—June 2026, released August 4, 2026.
