Changes in the economic environment over recent decades have led to growing concerns about decreasing job stability. In particular, the potential decline in the prevalence of jobs that last for a long period of time (that is, ‘a job for life’) has been intensively discussed in both academic research and the media (Hall, 1982, is a seminal paper). The fear is that globalisation and technological progress such as advances in communication technologies have induced changes in the labour market, requiring employees to be more flexible. Workers have to adapt to more frequent transitions between jobs and intermittent spells of unemployment. These changes in the labour market are likely to affect job satisfaction and worker well-being (European Commission, 2001). Job tenure, i.e. the length of time a worker has been continuously employed by the same employer, is of paramount interest to workers in this context since it can be interpreted as a measure of job stability (Neumark, 2000). Apart from long-term trends, the evidence from the recent financial and economic crisis suggests the labour turnover rate was strongly affected, with potentially severe consequences for job tenure. The crisis has led to a large and persistent increase in unemployment in many European countries but also to a divergent development of labour markets across the European Union. Since worker turnover is closely connected with the length of time in a job, it is expected that the Great Recession also had an effect on job tenure. Against this background, our paper analyses the evolution of job tenure measured by the length of uncompleted employment spells at the same employer3 for the time period 2002 to 2012 for a large number of European countries using worker-level data from the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS). In doing so, we provide evidence both for longer-term trends as well as recent developments which took place during the Great Recession. In particular, we provide aggregate evidence on the evolution of job tenure at the European level, but also for specific countries. Furthermore, the richness of the EU-LFS data allows us to analyse heterogeneities with respect to both worker and job characteristics. Finally, we analyse cross-country differences, pointing out the importance of the institutional framework in the form of employment protection legislation. Therefore, this study fully exploits the richness of the micro data from the EU-LFS from 2002 to 2012 to examine how job tenure has evolved across EU countries during the pre-crisis and crisis period. Our analysis is related to several strands of the literature. Job tenure was analysed in an international context by Auer and Cazes (2000) and Cazes and Tonin (2010). Both studies, the first one for the 1990s and the second one for the time period 1996 to 2006, find that mean tenure remained relatively stable in most European countries and increased only slightly in a few countries during the observation period. However, the authors report pronounced level differences between countries which they attribute to heterogeneous labour market institutions and workers’ labour market behaviours. Examining data for eight EU countries, Japan, Russia, and the USA for the mid1990s, Burgess (1999) found that the UK and the USA had relatively low-tenured working relationships. These results suggest that tenure is generally low in countries that are characterised by flexible labour markets. Besides, results from Burgess (1999) suggest that employment protection legislation (EPL) has a positive effect on mean tenure. Furthermore, Boockmann and Steffes (2010) found that labour market institutions play an important role in reducing mobility and thus prolonging tenure.