During the pandemic-induced hiring boom known as the “Great Retirement,” changing jobs often meant big raises.
Nowadays, there are fewer economic benefits to moving and more workers are choosing to stay on-site. Economists refer to this trend as the “Great Stay.”
The median wage increase for workers who changed jobs in January was about 4%, according to a recent analysis of payroll transfer data by the Bank of America Research Institute. That’s less than a third of the roughly 14% raises seen at the peak of the pandemic employment boom in 2022, and less than half the raises workers typically got when changing jobs in 2019. This indicator reflects the change in wages during the three months following a job change compared to the same three months in the previous year.
“There was a huge hiring boom in 2021 and 2022 during the pandemic recovery period, and as employers competed aggressively for talent, salaries rose significantly, even horizontally,” said Bonnie Dilber, recruiting leader at software company Zapier.
“There is now a huge pool of candidates and there is less reason for companies to compete aggressively on salaries,” she says.
Even if you change jobs, your salary won’t increase as much as before.
The current labor market is very different from the pandemic hiring boom, when employers scrambled to fill open positions. The number of job openings rose from about 7 million in 2019 to a record 12.2 million in March 2022, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but has returned to near pre-pandemic levels in recent months.
The U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs in February, and the unemployment rate rose to 4.4% from a low of 3.4% in April 2023, according to BLS data.
The number of workers who voluntarily quit their jobs is also decreasing. The turnover rate, a measure of workers changing jobs, has fallen from about 3% in 2022 to about 2% now, according to BLS data.
Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, which tracks overall wage growth for workers who change jobs compared to those who stay put, similarly shows that the job premium is shrinking.
For most of 2022 and 2023, the median year-over-year wage increase for workers who changed jobs was about 2 percentage points higher than for workers who stayed with the same employer, according to the Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker.
This gap largely narrowed through much of 2025, as wage growth for those who changed jobs slowed sharply, while raises for those who stayed fell more slowly. The latest data shows that the wage growth rate for those who changed jobs was approximately 4.4%, while the wage growth rate for those who left their jobs was 3.9%, which is a much smaller difference compared to 2022 and 2023.
“When you change jobs, you often get a raise, but the increase is likely to be smaller than it was a few years ago,” said Christina DePasquale, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.
“As employment cools and the unemployment rate approaches its long-term average, workers appear to be more cautious about leaving their current jobs, which helps explain recent work-attachment behavior,” she says. Workers are clinging to their current roles rather than changing jobs.
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