You are not loyal. You are scared, and staying put is quietly costing you money.
The rate at which Americans voluntarily quit their jobs has sat near 2 percent since the start of last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. In May, quits held at 1.9 percent, about 3.1 million people. Outside the first weeks of the pandemic, the underlying data shows quit rates this low have not been seen since early 2016. Compare that with November 2021, the peak of the so-called Great Resignation, when a record 4.5 million people quit in a single month. That is more than a million fewer people walking out the door every month now than at the top of the last cycle, and it is not because everyone suddenly loves their job.
Korn Ferry gave the behavior a name last August: job hugging, or "holding onto their jobs for dear life." Matt Bohn, an executive search consultant there, calls the standstill itself "the danger of this job market," and he added that the risk cuts both ways: firms too "run the risk of becoming comfortable perches from which workers can jump when the time's right." The part that lands on you is quieter: skills not built and cases not made while everyone waits out the uncertainty do not reappear once the market loosens.
Here is the part that should bother you more than the vibes do. For most of the last fifteen years, switching jobs has been the single fastest way to a bigger raise. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Wage Growth Tracker, which has followed this for decades, shows something strange happened for about six months starting in February 2025: job stayers actually out-earned job switchers, a reversal that had only occurred twice before since the late 1990s, both around recessions. A separate caveat applies to later data in that same series: the Fed reported thinner survey samples in November and December 2025, months after that reversal window had closed, so those particular readings carry a wider margin of error than the rest of the series. Allison Shrivastava, an economist at the job site Indeed, told CNBC why: with almost nobody voluntarily quitting, the people who do switch jobs are disproportionately those pushed out involuntarily, and they often land somewhere that pays worse, not better. That drags the average "switcher" raise down, not because staying got more rewarding, but because switching got riskier.
By this year the switcher premium had returned, but thin, an edge of well under a point in some readings, a long way from the multi-point gaps of the job-hopping years. ADP's separate Pay Insights data, built from a different sample of roughly 26 million paychecks a month and not directly comparable in magnitude to the Atlanta Fed's numbers, points the same direction: the pay bump for changing employers, which hit roughly 16 percent at the top of the Great Resignation in April 2022, has fallen sharply since and reverses entirely in some industries, including information as well as leisure and hospitality, where staying now pays better.
None of this means quitting blind is the answer. Career coach Mandi Woodruff-Santos told CNBC, bluntly, "I don't think job hugging is the move." She recommends what she calls pivoting in place: asking for the promotion, shadowing the colleague doing the job you want next, building the internal case before you need one. Alan Guarino, a Korn Ferry vice chairman, told the same outlet that with less room to differentiate through growth, "you might actually have to work harder to be impressive."
The Monday move: this week, write down what a switcher in your role and city is actually being paid right now, using a real posted range if pay transparency laws in your state give you one, and bring that number into your next one-on-one as the opening line for an internal raise, not a threat to leave. Staying can still be the right call. Staying silent about what the market says you are worth is the expensive one.
