Hospitality now employs more people in the United States than at any point on record. That headline, drawn from a national hospitality labor report published this year by The Staffing Agency, might suggest the industry has finally steadied itself after several rough years. Look closer, though, and the same report finds something more interesting underneath the growth: hotels and restaurants are still replacing seventy to eighty percent of their staff every single year, and quick service kitchens often turn over their entire team more than once. Growth and constant rehiring, it turns out, are happening side by side.
A Workforce Still Finding Its Balance
Wages explain part of the story. Between 2020 and early 2025, average hospitality pay in the US climbed from $16.84 to $22.70 an hour, one of the sharpest increases the sector has recorded in decades. The report describes the past year as a period of settling, a new and higher baseline rather than a temporary spike. That is genuinely good news for workers, but it has not, on its own, closed the retention gap. If people were leaving hospitality jobs purely for better pay elsewhere, a raise of that size would have shown up in steadier staffing levels by now. Something else keeps the door turning.
The Workforce Inside the Workforce
One of the more striking figures in the report has nothing to do with pay at all. One in three hospitality workers in the United States was born outside the country, and in cities like New York, Miami and Los Angeles that share runs even higher. The roles that keep a hotel running day to day, housekeeping, kitchen prep, back of house support, depend on a steady pipeline of people who chose to come and build a career somewhere new. The report calls this reliance on immigrant labor deeper than almost anywhere else in the US economy, and it notes that tighter visa limits, rising fees and slower processing times land on hospitality employers faster than on most other industries, simply because so much of the workforce moves through exactly those channels.
That is precisely the gap we spend our days working on at ItalianExperience. We connect hotels and restaurants abroad, most often in the US, with Italian hospitality professionals who trained for years inside a culture built around service, and we walk both sides through the visa process step by step, so that a steady pipeline is not just a line in a report but something a hiring manager can actually plan a season around. Trained well, documented properly, and ready to commit: that combination is worth more right now than another round of job postings.
Data referenced from The Staffing Agency's Hospitality Labor Report.
The hotels that do best over the next decade will not be the ones that filled the most seats. They will be the ones that knew exactly who was sitting in them, and why those people chose to stay.