Staying Loyal to Your Job Is Now Costing You 2.6% a Year in Pay Growth

New payroll data released this month from ADP, covering more than 26 million workers, confirms something a lot of employees have quietly suspected for a while: staying put is no longer where the pay growth is.

Workers who switched employers in July 2026 saw their pay grow 7.0% year-over-year — the fastest pace for job-changers since August 2025. Workers who stayed in their current role saw pay grow just 4.4%, unchanged from the month before and sitting near the lowest level recorded since June 2021.

That's a 2.6 percentage point gap between staying and switching. On a $65,000 salary, that gap alone is worth roughly $1,700 a year in raw pay growth — before even accounting for a genuinely better offer, not just an average one.

ADP's chief economist described the dynamic plainly: job-changers are highly sensitive to real-time market conditions, and their fast pay growth signals real supply constraints in parts of the labor market — employers are having to pay up specifically to pull people away from their current jobs, even while overall hiring stays historically slow.

This isn't uniform across every industry. Earlier ADP research found construction workers who switched employers earned a 6.6% premium over those who stayed, and financial services showed some of the strongest switching premiums in the service sector. Leisure and hospitality was the clear exception — workers there were generally better off staying put than switching, a reminder that this trend rewards specific in-demand skills more than others.

The catch is what economists call a "low hire, low fire" market. Companies aren't laying people off aggressively, but they're also not hiring aggressively either — which makes people who already have a job more cautious about testing the market, even while the data shows the reward for doing so has rarely been bigger relative to staying.

If you're weighing a new offer against your current role, the number that actually matters isn't the headline salary on either side — it's your real after-tax take-home on both, side by side, including any changes to benefits, 401k match, or state.

Have you switched jobs recently — or are you still weighing whether it's worth it?