Key Facts

• 47% of restaurant operators had job openings they couldn’t fill in 2025, according to the National Restaurant Association (NRA). The industry’s own pool is thin, at about one unemployed hospitality worker per opening (BLS data via FRED).
• Restaurants and hotels lost 719,000 workers to quits in September 2026, up from 522,000 in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). Their quits rate of 5.0% was the highest of any industry.
• Employers in the sector hired 879,000 people that month, almost exactly matching the 883,000 who left.
• The typical restaurant and bar worker has been with their employer just 2.2 years, compared with 3.9 years for all private-sector workers (BLS). Turnover across restaurants averaged 122% in 2025 (NRA).
• The jobs need no formal education or prior experience. The one permanent visa for jobs like these, the EB-3 visa’s Other Workers category, is capped at 10,000 a year for every industry combined, family members included (8 U.S.C. 1153).

Ask any restaurant owner about hiring and you’ll hear two complaints.

First, too few people apply for entry-level jobs like dishwasher, prep cook and counter worker.

Second, the people who do get hired often don’t stay. Many leave within months, before the restaurant has made back what it spent hiring and training them.

The data backs up both. Nearly half of restaurant operators had openings they couldn’t fill in 2025. And in September 2026, workers in restaurants and hotels quit at the fastest rate of any industry in the country. Employers hired hundreds of thousands of people that month and ended up about where they started.

This article walks through the federal data on why entry-level restaurant jobs are so hard to fill, and to keep filled. It also explains why the EB-3 visa fits these jobs, and why the current cap keeps it from doing more.

For the combined restaurant and hotel picture, including how openings changed through the summer, see our analysis of the hospitality labor shortage in 2026.

The U.S. Has More Open Jobs Than Unemployed Workers

Start with the whole economy, because restaurants compete with every other employer for the same entry-level workers.

In September 2026, U.S. employers reported 7,523,000 job openings. That same month, 7,109,000 people were unemployed, according to the BLS Employment Situation report for September 2026.

A year earlier, it was the other way around: 7,169,000 openings and 7,605,000 unemployed people.

Table 1: U.S. openings vs. unemployed workers

Measure	Sept. 2025	Sept. 2026 (preliminary)
Job openings, all industries	7,169,000	7,523,000
Unemployed people	7,605,000	7,109,000

A restaurant hiring a line cook or a counter worker isn’t only competing with the restaurant across the street.

It’s competing with warehouses, retailers, hotels, cleaning companies and factories. Many of them hire for the same entry-level, no-experience jobs.

Too Few Workers Are Left to Hire

Now narrow it to restaurants and hotels.

BLS counts an “unemployed leisure and hospitality worker” as someone out of work whose most recent job was in that industry. It’s the closest official measure of how many experienced restaurant and hotel workers are available to hire.

BLS doesn’t publish this count for restaurants alone. Leisure and hospitality covers restaurants, bars, hotels, and arts and recreation.

Table 2: Unemployed hospitality workers vs. hospitality openings

Measure	Sept. 2025	Aug. 2026	Sept. 2026 (preliminary)
Unemployed leisure and hospitality workers	939,000	907,000	874,000
Leisure and hospitality job openings	1,154,000	801,000	805,000

A year ago, openings outnumbered unemployed workers in the industry. Today the two numbers are close to even.

That’s a thin pool. Not every unemployed hospitality worker is a realistic candidate for a given restaurant. Some live too far away, some want a different shift, and some are between jobs for only a week or two.

The unemployment rate for leisure and hospitality workers was 6.2% in October 2026, not seasonally adjusted, according to BLS Table A-14. That’s higher than the national rate of 3.9% on the same basis.

Restaurant operators feel that thin pool when they post a job.

47% had openings that were hard to fill in 2025, according to the NRA. Full-service restaurants had it worse, at 51%, than limited-service restaurants, at 43%. And 22% didn’t have enough staff to meet customer demand.

The Federal Reserve hears the same thing. In its October 2026 Beige Book, contacts in the New York district in “landscaping, restaurants, home health care, and passenger transportation” reported trouble finding and keeping reliable workers.

Finding someone is only half the problem. Keeping them is the other half.

Restaurant Workers Are Quitting, Not Being Laid Off

That’s where the data turns sharply.

Table 3: Restaurant and hotel hiring and turnover

Measure	Sept. 2025	Aug. 2026	Sept. 2026 (preliminary)
Job openings	989,000 (6.5%)	676,000 (4.5%)	659,000 (4.4%)
Hires	766,000 (5.4%)	721,000 (5.0%)	879,000 (6.1%)
Quits	488,000 (3.4%)	522,000 (3.6%)	719,000 (5.0%)
Layoffs and discharges	185,000 (1.3%)	139,000 (1.0%)	151,000 (1.1%)
Total separations	687,000 (4.8%)	688,000 (4.8%)	883,000 (6.2%)

In a single month, quits rose by 197,000. Layoffs barely moved.

The September quits rate of 5.0% was the highest of any industry BLS tracks. Across all private employers, it was 2.3%. Across the whole economy, it was 2.1%.

Hiring hard just to stay even

Employers responded the only way they could: they hired.

Restaurants and hotels brought on 879,000 people in September 2026, up from 721,000 in August.

But 883,000 people left. All that hiring didn’t grow the workforce. It replaced the people who walked out.

That’s the cycle restaurant operators know well. You train a new dishwasher, and a week later you’re training another one because a prep cook left.

Openings fell, and the churn didn’t

There’s one more detail worth noticing in Table 3.

Openings in restaurants and hotels fell over the year, from 989,000 to 659,000. On its own, that could look like the shortage is easing.

It isn’t. Fewer openings didn’t make the jobs easier to fill or to keep. Quits went the other direction, and the jobs that exist are turning over faster, not slower.

Quits in this sector move around from month to month. September’s 719,000 was the highest since June 2025, when it reached 785,000, according to BLS data via FRED. It isn’t a record.

What it does show is that, even after a year of falling openings, restaurant workers still feel free to leave.

Restaurants Replace Their Whole Staff Every Year

The National Restaurant Association (NRA) puts numbers on what that churn looks like inside a restaurant.

In its Hiring and Staffing Report 2026, the NRA reports that average turnover in restaurants and foodservice was 122.19% in 2025, based on a Lightcast analysis of BLS data.

A turnover rate above 100% means a restaurant replaced more people over the year than it had on staff.

BLS data on how long workers stay points the same way. In January 2026, the median food service and bar worker had been with their current employer for 2.2 years. Across all private-sector jobs, the median was 3.9 years.

That’s the median, which includes managers and long-time staff. For entry-level jobs with turnover above 100%, many workers leave far sooner.

Note: BLS changed its industry classifications starting with January 2026 data, so tenure figures aren’t strictly comparable with earlier years.

Table 4: Restaurant turnover by job, 2025

Job	Turnover rate
Waiters and waitresses	130.56%
Dishwashers	124.38%
Food preparation workers	104.04%
Cooks, restaurant	85.47%
Cooks, fast food	78.58%
Chefs and head cooks	73.45%
Food service managers	45.63%
All restaurant and foodservice jobs	122.19%

The highest rates are in front-line jobs: servers, dishwashers and prep workers. Turnover falls as workers move into cooking and management roles.

The same report found it takes about 16 days to fill an hourly position. A new hourly employee doesn’t break even for the restaurant until about 31.8 days on the job.

So every time an entry-level worker leaves in the first month, the restaurant loses the money it spent hiring and training them, and starts over.

Sixty-two percent of operators told the NRA that recruiting and retaining employees was a very or fairly significant challenge.

A young workforce that moves on

Part of the reason is who does the work.

In 2025, restaurants and bars employed about 9,286,000 people, according to BLS. Of those, 1,837,000 were 16 to 19 years old and 1,999,000 were 20 to 24.

The median worker was 29.2 years old. Across all industries, the median was 42.1.

Note: BLS’s 2025 annual averages exclude October, when data wasn’t collected because of the federal shutdown.

Construction and manufacturing worry about a retirement wave. Restaurants have the opposite problem.

Many of their workers are teenagers or in their early 20s. They’re not retiring. They’re moving on to another industry or the next job up the road.

That makes the restaurant workforce one of the hardest in the country to hold onto.

Pay Is Rising, and Workers Still Leave

Restaurants have tried to solve this with pay.

Average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers in leisure and hospitality rose from $20.45 in October 2025 to $21.40 in October 2026, according to BLS payroll data via FRED.

For comparison, the average for all private-sector production and nonsupervisory workers was $32.75 in October 2026.

Pay went up. Quits went up too.

That doesn’t mean wages don’t matter. It means a raise alone hasn’t stopped entry-level workers from leaving.

Operators say hiring is still a challenge

The NRA’s figures show hiring has gotten easier than it was in the worst years, but it hasn’t gotten easy.

• 47% of operators had job openings that were hard to fill in 2025, down from 59% in 2024 and a peak of 79% in 2022.
• Full-service restaurants had it worse, at 51%, than limited-service restaurants, at 43%.
• 22% of operators didn’t have enough staff to meet customer demand.

For short-staffed restaurants, the cost is real. Nearly 8 in 10 short-staffed operators said it significantly limits their ability to grow and succeed.

And demand isn’t going away. The NRA projects restaurant and foodservice employment will reach 15.8 million jobs in 2026, with operators adding more than 100,000 jobs, according to its 2026 industry outlook.

What the Federal Reserve is hearing

The Federal Reserve’s October 2026 Beige Book gathers reports from businesses in all 12 Fed districts.

Nationally, it found that labor supply “was generally adequate to meet demand.”

But two districts singled out restaurants and hospitality:

• In the New York district, contacts in “landscaping, restaurants, home health care, and passenger transportation” reported trouble finding and keeping reliable workers.
• In the Minneapolis district, hiring was mostly to replace turnover, “particularly in hospitality.” The district also reported that “Some agricultural and hospitality businesses reported declining availability of foreign-born workers.”

In other words, restaurants face both problems at once: finding workers and keeping them.

The Hardest Jobs to Fill and Keep Need No Experience

The jobs at the center of this problem are the entry-level ones: counter workers, prep cooks, dishwashers and line cooks.

Here’s how the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook describes them.

Table 5: Entry-level restaurant jobs

Job	Typical education	Experience needed	Jobs, 2025	Openings per year, 2025-35	Median pay, May 2025
Food and beverage serving and related workers	No formal credential	None	5,143,000	1,078,500	$15.24/hr
Fast food and counter workers (part of the group above)	No formal credential	None	3,855,900	n/a	$15.00/hr
Food preparation workers	No formal credential	None	908,500	135,700	$16.98/hr
Cooks	Typically no formal education	Learned on the job	2,705,800	393,200	$17.62/hr

Training for these jobs is short. BLS says food preparation workers usually train on the job for several weeks.

Cooks typically learn their skills on the job too, often starting as a kitchen helper or food preparation worker, according to BLS.

Most of the openings aren’t new jobs. BLS says food preparation openings are all expected to come from “the need to replace workers,” and openings for serving workers mostly from “the need to replace workers who transfer.”

That’s turnover, built into the government’s own projections.

Immigrant workers already do much of this work

Foreign-born workers are more likely than native-born workers to work in these jobs.

In 2025, 6.1% of employed foreign-born workers held food preparation and serving jobs, compared with 4.8% of native-born workers, according to BLS data on foreign-born workers.

The Minneapolis Fed’s report of “declining availability of foreign-born workers” in hospitality shows what happens when that supply tightens.

For restaurants, that’s a practical risk. A kitchen that depends on workers without stable, permanent status can lose staff with no warning. A kitchen built on workers with green cards doesn’t carry that risk.

Why the EB-3 Visa Fits Entry-Level Restaurant Jobs

There’s one permanent visa built for jobs like these: the EB-3 visa’s Other Workers category.

The law describes these jobs almost word for word

Federal law defines Other Workers as people “capable, at the time of petitioning for classification under this paragraph, of performing unskilled labor, not of a temporary or seasonal nature, for which qualified workers are not available in the United States.”

Compare that with Table 5. No formal education, no prior experience and a few weeks of on-the-job training.

Year-round restaurant jobs are exactly the kind of work this category was written for.

The process tests the same thing this data shows

Before an employer can sponsor a worker through the EB-3 visa, it has to complete PERM labor certification with the U.S. Department of Labor.

That means recruiting locally at the prevailing wage first and showing that qualified U.S. workers aren’t available for the job. EB3.work’s Prevailing Wage Calculator gives employers an estimate of that wage.

So the EB-3 visa doesn’t replace local hiring. It starts with it.

When local recruitment comes up short, the EB-3 visa lets a restaurant hire from outside a thin local pool. That’s the answer to the first problem. The second is keeping people.

For a restaurant that posts the same jobs over and over, gets too few applicants and can’t keep the ones it hires, PERM puts that experience on paper.

The EB-3 visa workers are permanent

The EB-3 visa workers arrive as lawful permanent residents with green cards. They come for a full-time, year-round job, not a temporary season.

That’s the direct answer to the problem in Table 3. A restaurant losing workers every month needs people who plan to stay, learn the kitchen and grow into a lead role.

As EB3.work’s quick service restaurant page puts it, “EB-3 workers often stay long-term, since the role provides a path to permanent residency.”

A green card also means stable, legal status to work. That removes the risk of losing a cook overnight because of an immigration status problem.

The tradeoffs

The EB-3 visa isn’t a quick fix, and restaurants should plan with that in mind.

• It’s capped, for every industry combined. The law allows “not more than 10,000” Other Workers category visas per fiscal year. That one cap is shared by restaurants, hotels, factories, cleaning companies, care providers and every other employer in the country.
• Families count against the cap. According to the Congressional Research Service, “Both principals and derivatives count against the annual numerical limits.” EB3.work CEO John Dorer has estimated that only about 3,000 of the 10,000 go to workers, with about 7,000 going to their spouses and children (Construction Dive).
• It takes time. The wait depends on PERM processing and on the State Department’s monthly Visa Bulletin. EB3.work’s EB-3 Processing Times tool tracks current estimates.
• The job must be year-round. The EB-3 visa covers only permanent, full-time positions. A seasonal beach restaurant or ski lodge kitchen should look at the H-2B program instead.

The cap next to the data

Put the numbers from this article next to the cap.

Measure	Figure
Restaurant and hotel quits, September 2026 (one month)	719,000
Restaurant and hotel job openings, September 2026 (one month)	659,000
Annual openings for food and beverage serving workers, projected	1,078,500
The EB-3 visa Other Workers category visas per year, all industries, families included	Not more than 10,000

That’s why the EB-3 visa is slow today, and why we’ve argued that Congress should raise the Other Workers cap. Our analysis of reshoring and the 10,000 cap covers that case in detail.

The cap is a reason the pathway takes years. It isn’t a reason not to start. A restaurant that starts now is building its team for the years ahead.

The Dignity Act would free up thousands of visas for workers

One proposal in Congress would ease the cap without changing the 10,000 number. The Dignity Act of 2025 (H.R. 4393) was introduced on July 15, 2025, by Rep. María Elvira Salazar, with cosponsors from both parties. It includes a section on “spouses and minor children of workers.” Under the bill, only the worker would count toward the annual green card limit, not the worker’s spouse or children.

For the EB-3 visa’s Other Workers category, that change alone would make a big difference. If about 7,000 of the 10,000 visas go to family members each year, as John Dorer estimates, most of the category could go to the workers employers are trying to hire.

EB3.work endorses the Dignity Act and supports its passage. Restaurant owners who want shorter waits for the workers they sponsor can add their voice in support of the Dignity Act and contact their representatives.

Where EB3.work comes in

EB3.work helps U.S. employers recruit and sponsor workers through the EB-3 visa, with a focus on entry-level roles. Its restaurant program helps employers fill front-line and back-of-house restaurant roles, and its quick service program helps operators “Build a permanent crew at your QSR.”

According to EB3.work, the cost to the employer is “a flat fee of around $1,500 in total,” and “There are no recruiting fees.” The company partners with “a seasoned team of immigration attorneys who manage the EB-3 process from start to finish.”

For a restaurant group that needs several cooks and prep workers across locations, the flat cost matters. Sponsoring one worker or many costs the same.

Employers can check whether they qualify with the Employer Eligibility Calculator and compare the cost of turnover with sponsorship using the ROI Workforce Calculator.

Frequently Asked Questions

What This Means for Employers

The data points to a restaurant labor market where hiring is hard and keeping people is harder. Here’s what operators can do:

1. Budget for replacement hiring, not just growth. Restaurants and hotels hired 879,000 people in September 2026 and lost 883,000. Plan your hiring calendar and costs around the people you’ll lose, not only the positions you’ll add.
2. Fix the first 30 days. A new hourly employee takes about 31.8 days to break even, and turnover for dishwashers and servers runs above 120%. Structured onboarding, a set training buddy and early check-ins protect the money you’ve already spent.
3. Benchmark pay against the whole market. Production workers in leisure and hospitality averaged $21.40 an hour in October 2026, while all private-sector production workers averaged $32.75. Your competition for a prep cook includes warehouses and retailers, not just other restaurants.
4. Show entry-level workers a path up. Turnover falls from 104.04% for food preparation workers to 85.47% for restaurant cooks and 73.45% for chefs and head cooks. Cooks learn on the job, so a clear path from dishwasher to prep cook to line cook gives people a reason to stay.
5. Build a permanent core team with the EB-3 visa. For year-round kitchen and counter roles, the EB-3 visa’s Other Workers category brings workers who arrive with green cards and come for a long-term job. It currently takes 48+ months and is capped at 10,000 a year for all industries, so it works best as a long-term pipeline alongside local hiring, not a fix for next week’s schedule.

Restaurants are short on both ends: too few people apply, and too few of those hired stay.

Operators that plan for that, and build a stable core team now, will spend less time rehiring the same jobs every month.

Sources

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, September 2026 (released Nov. 3, 2026)
• EB3.work, Hospitality Labor Shortage 2026
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Employment Situation, September 2026 (released Oct. 2, 2026)
• National Restaurant Association, Hiring and Staffing Report 2026
• Federal Reserve, Beige Book, October 2026
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Force Characteristics of Foreign-Born Workers, Table 4, 2025
• EB3.work, Prevailing Wage Calculator
• EB3.work, EB-3 Visa Workers for QSR Operators
• EB3.work, Employer Eligibility Calculator
• EB3.work, ROI Workforce Calculator
• EB3.work, Support the Dignity Act