CNBC.COM
During the pandemic hiring boom known as the "Great Resignation," switching jobs often meant a sizable pay raise.
These days, there's less financial upside to making the move, and more workers are choosing to stay put — a trend economists call the "Great Stay."
Workers who switched jobs in January saw median pay increases of about 4%, according to recent Bank of America Institute analysis of payroll deposit data. That's less than a third of the roughly 14% raises seen at the peak of the pandemic hiring boom in 2022 and less than half of what workers typically gained from switching jobs in 2019. The measure reflects the change in pay in the three months after a job move compared with the same three months a year earlier.
"There was a huge hiring boom in 2021 to 2022 during our pandemic recovery which pushed salaries up quite a bit, even for lateral moves, as employers competed aggressively for talent," says Bonnie Dilber, a recruiting leader at software company Zapier.
"Now, there's a huge candidate pool and companies have less reason to compete aggressively on salary," she says.
Job hopping doesn't pay like it used to
The labor market today looks very different from the pandemic hiring boom, when employers were scrambling to fill open roles. Job openings rose from about 7 million in 2019 to a record 12.2 million in March 2022 before falling back close to pre-pandemic levels in recent months, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs in February and the unemployment rate rose to 4.4%, up from a 3.4% low in April 2023, according to BLS data.
Fewer workers are leaving their jobs voluntarily as well. The quits rate — a measure of workers changing jobs — has fallen from about 3% in 2022 to roughly 2% today, per BLS data.
Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta — which tracks overall wage growth for workers who switch jobs compared with those who stay put — similarly shows the job-hopping premium has shrunk.
For much of 2022 and 2023, workers who changed jobs saw median year-over-year wage growth roughly 2 percentage points higher than those who stayed with the same employer, according to the Atlanta Fed's Wage Growth Tracker.
That gap largely disappeared through most of 2025 as wage growth for job switchers cooled sharply while raises for workers who stayed put declined more gradually. In the latest reading, wage growth for job switchers was about 4.4%, compared with 3.9% for job stayers — a much slimmer margin than in 2022 or 2023.
"While switching jobs can often lead to a higher salary, the increase is likely smaller than it was a few years ago," says Christina DePasquale, a professor of economics at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.
"As hiring has cooled and unemployment has moved closer to its long-run average," she says, "workers appear more cautious about leaving their current jobs, which helps explain the recent job-hugging behavior" — where workers hold on to the roles they have instead of changing jobs.
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