A first-person account from Kate Johnson, military spouse and entrepreneur, contextualized with findings from IVMF research funded in part by USAA. Part of The Career You Never See, IVMF’s campaign on military spouse employment.
Military spouses are among the most educated, adaptable, and motivated members of the American workforce. Yet structural barriers rooted in military life, namely frequent relocation, caregiving demands, and licensing complexity, continue to suppress their employment outcomes in ways that decades of awareness campaigns have not resolved. The experience of Kate Johnson, a military spouse and business owner, illustrates both the human cost of these barriers and the resourcefulness that emerges when institutional support falls short.
Her account is not exceptional. It is representative. And that is precisely why it warrants the attention of those with the authority to act.
The Employment Disruption Cycle
In less than a calendar year, Johnson’s family received Permanent Change of Station (PCS) orders twice. Each move required her to resign from a position and re-enter the job market in an unfamiliar location, a cycle that exacts both professional and psychological costs.
“For me, the hardest part wasn’t the moving. It was the lack of control that I felt in maintaining a career with all the moving. Even though it wasn’t my fault, I felt like I was almost apologizing for my life and who I was married to. It was really crushing.”
The cumulative weight of repeated, involuntary career interruptions led Johnson to withdraw from the workforce altogether, a response that research confirms is common among military spouses confronting the same structural pattern.
According to the Military Spouse Employment Landscape report published by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) at Syracuse University, funded in part by USAA, active-duty military spouses relocate 3.6 times more frequently than civilian families. One in four active-duty military spouses moves in any given year. These relocations are not incidental disruptions; they are recurring, service-mandated events with measurable consequences for employment continuity, earnings, and long-term career trajectory.
The Data Behind the Experience
Johnson’s withdrawal from the workforce reflects a pattern documented extensively in IVMF research. The unemployment rate for active-duty military spouses stands at 8.83%, nearly four times the 2.48% rate for civilian spouses, according to 2023 data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Median personal income for active-duty military spouses is $35,000, representing a 42% gap relative to civilian counterparts who earn a median of $60,000.
The impact of relocation on earnings is particularly stark. Active-duty military spouses who relocated within the prior year reported average income of $31,222, compared to $45,793 for those who remained in place, a 32% income reduction attributable directly to a move they did not choose.
The IVMF’s companion narrative profile, Planning to Pivot: Employment Lessons from a Military Spouse, funded in part by USAA, documents additional dimensions of this challenge. The average military spouse job search following a PCS move lasts 29 weeks, more than double the civilian average for comparable age groups. Twenty-seven percent of military spouses have been searching for employment for over a year. Once employed, 28% are placed in roles outside their professional field, contributing to the chronic underemployment that aggregate labor force participation figures obscure.
“It was the lack of control that I felt in maintaining a career with all the moving”
Critically, these are not entry-level workforce challenges. The income gap between military spouses and civilian peers widens with education. Military spouses holding a bachelor’s degree earn $40,000 annually on average, compared to $74,000 for civilian peers, a disparity of 46%. Higher educational attainment does not close the gap; it expands it.
None of this stems from a lack of qualifications. profile documents that more than 80% of military spouses hold a post-secondary education, yet the share paid less than peers with comparable credentials rises with schooling, reaching 49% among spouses who hold a graduate degree. The penalty does not fade as spouses invest in themselves. It deepens.
The Long-Term Economic Consequences
The financial cost of military spouse career disruption is substantial and compounding. IVMF research estimates that the average enlisted spouse earns approximately $9,500 less per year than they would if their service member separated from the military. For officer spouses, that figure rises to $27,000 annually. Over the course of a 20-year military career, these losses accumulate to nearly $200,000 in foregone earnings per military spouse household.
These are not abstract projections. They represent retirement savings not accrued, Social Security credits not earned, and professional credentials not obtained. For the roughly 561,000 active-duty military spouses in the United States today, the aggregate economic impact is significant, and largely preventable. The spouses themselves see it clearly. In research by IVMF and Hiring Our Heroes, 90% of military spouses said military service had negatively affected their careers, and 88% said the lifestyle limits their ability to find work at their level of education or experience.
The spouses themselves see it clearly. In research by IVMF and Hiring Our Heroes, 90% of military spouses said military service had negatively affected their careers, and 88% said the lifestyle limits their ability to find work at their level of education or experience.
Entrepreneurship as Structural Adaptation
Faced with the repeated failure of traditional employment to accommodate military life, Johnson made a decision that IVMF research increasingly identifies as a pathway for mid-career military spouses: she started a business. Hear about Kate’s journey to entrepreneurship and her struggles as a military spouse.
“I decided maybe I needed to start a business, because I didn’t want that experience that I had with walking away from those jobs. So I became what I call a reluctant entrepreneur.”
Johnson is candid that entrepreneurship was not a preference but a pragmatic response to circumstances outside her control. She describes the work as difficult and, at times, still feeling unnatural. Yet the decision proved consequential. Beginning with a single client engagement valued at $800, and sustained in part by the active support of her spouse, she has built a practice with a full client roster and an established professional reputation.
“The only reason I’m here is because of the person that I married.”
That acknowledgment carries policy-relevant weight. Spousal and community support, access to professional networks, and the psychological resources to persist through early-stage business development are not uniformly available across the military spouse population. Johnson’s outcome is not a template; it is a data point in a larger distribution that skews toward underemployment, workforce exit, and foregone earnings.
Self-employment and entrepreneurship can serve as viable and portable career structures for military spouses. IVMF builds that path on purpose. V-WISE, its entrepreneurship training for women veterans and military spouses, gives spouses the tools to start and grow a business that moves when they do. However, they should be understood as an adaptation to a structural failure, not a solution to it. Policies that reduce employment disruption at the source, including portable professional licensing, employer incentives for remote and transferable positions, and expanded access to career-sustaining resources during PCS transitions, would address the problem rather than route around it.
Implications for Policy and Employer Practice
The evidence base on military spouse employment is no longer nascent. Research from IVMF and others has documented the scope, mechanisms, and costs of these disparities with increasing rigor. What remains insufficient is the policy and institutional response.
“Even though it wasn’t my fault, I felt like I was almost apologizing for my life and who I was married to.”
IVMF research identifies several areas in which targeted action could produce measurable improvement: expansion of interstate occupational licensing reciprocity; employer adoption of portable remote positions explicitly designed for highly mobile workers; investment in childcare infrastructure on and near military installations; and recruiter training to evaluate non-linear employment histories without penalizing the structural gaps that military life produces.
Start with licensing, where the federal fix already exists. The Military Spouse Licensing Relief Act, signed in 2023, amended the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act to require states to recognize a relocating spouse’s professional license after a PCS move. The law is sound, but the implementation is not. In a 2024 Defense Department survey, 28% of active-duty spouses still had to obtain a new license after their most recent move, often because frontline state licensing staff misdirect them. The tactical work now is enforcement and reach. That means Justice Department action where states fall short, broader state adoption of occupational licensing compacts in fields like nursing and teaching, and a fix for the gap that can strand spouses covered by a compact when they move to a state that has not joined one.
On the employer side, the infrastructure also exists. The Department of Defense Military Spouse Employment Partnership has signed more than 1,000 employers who pledge to recruit, hire, promote, and retain military spouses, and it has connected spouses to more than 275,000 job openings since 2011. The pledge already names retention and promotion. What it does not do is measure them. Tying partnership status to reported retention, advancement, and wage outcomes, not just job postings, would turn a hiring commitment into an accountability standard.
More than 80 large corporations have launched military spouse hiring initiatives, according to IVMF findings. Even with that scale of commitment, outcomes vary. Many initiatives still concentrate military spouses in entry-level or temporary roles rather than supporting long-term career advancement. Hiring is a necessary but insufficient condition for economic equity. Retention, promotion, and wage parity require deliberate commitment.
Childcare is workforce infrastructure, and for military families it is failing. It is the single most common reason spouses leave the workforce, cited by 30% of those who step away, and in most states it now costs more than in-state college tuition. Congress’s own Quality of Life Report warned that some service members may never gain access to fee assistance at all. Expanding programs and funding child development center capacity near high-turnover installations would remove a barrier that pushes spouses out of the workforce before a job offer is ever on the table.
Finally, the way employers read a military spouse’s resume has to change. A 29-week job search and a record full of moves are not red flags but a predictable shape of a military lifestyle, and civilian employers must possess the knowledge to see a military spouse resume gap entirely different. Being able to train applicant tracking systems and AI screeners not to auto-reject for employment gaps and short tenures, which are structural rather than performance signals, and give recruiters the cultural competence to read these records fairly. Build that into employer partnership onboarding and qualified spouses stop being screened out by the very gaps the system created.
Johnson’s trajectory, from involuntary workforce exit to established entrepreneur, reflects individual determination in the face of systemic obstacles. Policymakers and employers have the capacity to change the conditions that make such determination necessary in the first place.
The barriers confronting military spouses are well-documented, economically significant, and addressable. The question is no longer whether the problem exists. It is whether the institutions with authority to act will do so.
If you are a military spouse, your experience is evidence. Share your story with The Career You Never See and help turn a documented problem into a policy that follows.
About the Research
Statistics cited in this article are drawn from two publications by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) at Syracuse University, both funded in part by USAA: Military Spouse Employment Landscape: Trends, Barriers, and Opportunities (March 2025) and Planning to Pivot: Employment Lessons from a Military Spouse, a Narrative Profile from the Reimagining Military Spouse Employment Initiative (May 2026). The contents of those publications are solely the responsibility of the authors.