Go looking for evidence that American workers have given up on job hunting and you land on one figure. Monster's 2026 WorkWatch Report says 43 percent plan to job search this year, down from 93 percent. The release is precise about the 43: a Pollfish survey of 1,504 employed US adults, fielded on December 15, 2025. It says the 93 came from workers who "reported the same thing in 2025," so the question is meant to be the same one, and it sends readers on to the full report for "a side-by-side comparison of job-seeker mindsets," which is the thing in dispute.
So I read it. The report's methodology section describes one survey and only one, the same 1,504 employed US adults surveyed on December 15, 2025. The 93 percent turns up twice, once in the key findings and again in a table setting 2025's "High Intent to Move" against 2026's "Selective Movement," and in neither place is there anything behind it: no vendor, no field date, no sample, no link. The methodology never reaches it. As of publication, Monster's matching address for a 2025 edition returns "Sorry, this page isn't available," and the first page of its research index does not list one. It is a number to be careful with, because Monster's own report does not source it.
The employer side is not in dispute. Robert Half's April survey of more than 2,000 hiring managers has 66 percent planning to increase permanent hiring in the second half of 2026, up from 57 percent a year ago, and 58 percent saying qualified people are harder to find. Employers hiring while workers hide is a tidy story, and the worker side rests on that unchecked number.
A competing worker number points the other way. Robert Half surveyed more than 2,000 professionals that same April, and 46 percent plan to look within six months, up 19 points from 27 percent a year earlier. Apply the same suspicion here: Robert Half is a staffing firm that makes its living when people move, just as Monster is a jobs marketplace with its own stake in how workers read the market. And where Monster named its polling vendor, Robert Half names none, crediting only "an independent research firm." The question differs too, six months ahead rather than a calendar year.
So read behavior instead. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts quits in its Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, the closest thing to a headcount of people who actually walked. In June, quits ran at 2.0 percent of employment, and they had not left the 1.9 to 2.0 range all year. In 2019 the rate sat at 2.3 or 2.4 every month. Workers are staying put, whatever they tell pollsters.
What no survey tells you is whether staying put pays. The Atlanta Fed's Wage Growth Tracker publishes wage growth separately for people who changed jobs and people who did not, as three-month moving averages of the median twelve-month change. Its idea of a switcher is broad: a different occupation or industry than a year earlier, or a change of employer or of job duties in the past three months. Subtract stayers from switchers and you have the reward for moving, in that wide sense. From February to July 2025 it was negative, meaning switchers did slightly worse than the people who sat still. In August 2025 it turned positive, and it has been positive in every month the tracker has recorded since, though the Fed flags November and December 2025 as less certain because its sample ran about 10 percent smaller in those two months than in September 2025.
The size of that reward is the softer claim. July's gap was about 0.8 points. That is a single month, and the figures it invites comparison with are annual averages: from 2016 to 2019 those ran 0.7 to 1.1, while individual months swung a good deal wider.
The direction is sturdier, and ADP's July payroll data reaches it independently: pay grew 4.4 percent for stayers and 7 percent for job changers. That corroborates the direction and not the date, since ADP's own comparison, the largest increase since August 2025, describes where its series peaked rather than when it turned. The two differ in size because the measures differ: ADP reads employer changes in the payroll records of its own client firms, while the Atlanta Fed reads a survey median across the economy and counts a change of duties as switching too. "Job-changers are highly sensitive to real-time economic conditions, and their rapid pay growth implies supply constraints in parts of the labor market," said Nela Richardson, ADP's chief economist.
Those supply constraints are also the counter-argument. Indeed's Hiring Lab reads the same June figures as a low-hire, low-fire market and notes that the civilian labor force has been shrinking since the end of 2025. A smaller workforce produces the same employer complaint without a single worker refusing to move.
I have a stake in getting this right. In 2021, in a newsletter I wrote then and cannot link you to, I told readers to job-hop and let the market reward them. In 2024 the advantage shrank to almost nothing, averaging about 0.3 points, and in February 2025 it went negative. I reported that reversal here in July, but I did not say the part that was about me: anyone who took my 2021 advice late followed it into the one sustained stretch since then when moving paid less than staying. Leverage is not the same as motion, and it does not point the same way for long.
So do the check yourself. Open the Wage Growth Tracker and download the workbook. In the sheet named data_overall, find the columns marked Job Stayer and Job Switcher. Use that sheet, not the separate tab called Job Switcher, which averages over a twelve-month window and will give you a different figure. Subtract the first from the second for the latest month. A positive number means movers got a bigger raise than stayers, by that many points on the median. It is not an instruction to quit. It is the price of the choice you are already making by staying. The leverage came back before the confidence did, and the confidence is still a year behind.
