Charted: Job-Switcher Wage Premium Fell from +2.6 pp to +0.8 pp — and Four Industries Stopped Paying

The wage story that dominated briefing decks in 2021–22 was simple: changing jobs paid. The Atlanta Fed Wage Growth Tracker’s median for job switchers pulled well ahead of the median for job stayers, and the gap — the switcher-minus-stayer premium — became a shorthand for worker leverage. That shorthand is now half the size it was at the peak, and in several white-collar industries it has flipped sign.

On Tracker-anchored prints, the national premium peaked near +2.6 percentage points around March 2022, when switcher median wage growth ran about 6.4% against stayer growth near 3.8%. By May 2025 the two series had tied at 4.4% — a zero premium last seen in the post-housing-crisis years. The latest mid-2026 window shows a partial rebound: switchers near 4.4%, stayers near 3.6%, premium about +0.8 pp. The interactive dashboard above walks that national path against JOLTS quit rates, ranks industry premiums, scatters quits against the premium, heats industry-year cells, and cuts age and education cohorts.

What the premium actually measures The Tracker is not a payroll average. It is a median of individual year-over-year hourly wage changes from Current Population Survey matches, reported as a 12-month moving average. A job switcher is someone in a different industry or occupation than a year earlier, or whose employer or duties changed in the prior three months. A job stayer is everyone else in the matched sample. The premium is therefore a gap between two medians of wage growth rates, not a gap in wage levels.

That definition matters for interpretation. Because the CPS is an address-based survey, people who move cities often exit the matched sample. “Switching” here is geographically local in a way LinkedIn churn statistics are not. Voluntary quits, involuntary separations, and within-firm duty changes can all land in the switcher bucket. When layoffs rise, the switcher pool can load with workers who take pay cuts to re-enter employment — which compresses or inverts the premium even if voluntary job-hoppers still negotiate well.

The national compression arc From late 2019 into early 2020 the premium sat near +0.8 pp — roughly where it sits again today. The pandemic shock briefly crushed both series; the rebound was asymmetric. Switcher medians climbed into the mid-to-high single digits while stayer medians rose more slowly. The Great Resignation window (late 2021 through mid-2022) is where the premium cleared +2 pp and peaked near +2.6 pp.

Compression after the peak was not a one-month event. Through 2023 and 2024 the switcher series drifted down faster than the stayer series, so the gap narrowed even while both remained elevated versus pre-pandemic norms. The May 2025 print — switcher and stayer both at 4.4% — was the clean zero. Mid-2026’s +0.8 pp rebound coincides with a slightly firmer switcher median while stayers held near 3.6%. Overall Tracker growth near 3.8% sits between the two, as expected when switchers are a minority of the matched sample.

JOLTS total nonfarm quit rates tell the same leverage story in a different unit. Quits near 3.0% at the premium peak have settled near 1.9% in the latest window. Fewer voluntary exits mean fewer opportunities to convert an outside offer into a raise — and a higher share of switches that are not voluntary at all.

Industries where switching still pays A national +0.8 pp average hides a wide industry spread. Desk composites that allocate the national premium using Tracker industry wage-growth ranks, JOLTS industry quit rates, and ADP-style industry wage differentials put leisure and hospitality near +1.9 pp, construction near +1.5 pp, retail near +1.2 pp, and health care near +1.1 pp. These are high-churn or chronically short-staffed sectors where outside offers still clear a raise above staying put.

Transportation and warehousing sit in the middle (~+0.7 pp): still positive, but far below the +2.9 pp peak print in the composite. Manufacturing hovers near flat (~+0.3 pp). The pattern is intuitive: industries that never fully escaped staffing pressure kept a switcher edge; industries that rebalanced headcount did not.

Industries where switching stopped paying Four industries in the panel print ≤0 pp at the latest cut — the operational definition of “switching stopped paying” for this desk:

Information (including tech) is the clearest inversion: peak near +2.7 pp, trough near −1.1 pp, latest about −0.8 pp. Professional and business services and finance follow with smaller negative prints; education sits at a clean zero. In these sectors, a non-trivial share of “switches” since 2023 have been layoff-driven re-entries, contract-to-perm resets, or lateral moves that do not clear a raise. ADP industry wage growth in the low-to-mid 2–3% range for these groups lines up with a labor market that no longer rewards hopping the way it did in 2021–22.

The quits × premium scatter makes the split visual. High-quit leisure and retail still sit in the upper-right quadrant. Low-quit finance and information sit lower-left. Quit rates are not destiny — professional services can quit at moderate rates and still print a negative premium when the switcher pool is contaminated by involuntary moves — but the correlation is the right first cut for a desk brief.

Age and education cohorts still disagree Even with a thin national premium, who switches still matters. Modeled age cuts put 16–24 near +1.6 pp and 25–34 near +1.1 pp, while 55+ sits near +0.2 pp. Younger workers change employers more often and still clear larger growth gaps when they do. That is consistent with steeper early-career wage profiles and with employers competing harder for scarce entry-level and early-career supply in services and trades.

Education cuts flip the Great Resignation slogan. HS or less still clears about +1.3 pp; bachelor’s holders are nearer +0.4 pp; advanced degrees print roughly flat to slightly negative. Credentialed white-collar markets absorbed the largest post-2022 demand chill. Less-credentialed service and goods cohorts kept more of the switcher edge because the underlying vacancy pressure never fully vanished.

Why the premium can be zero while wages still rise A zero or thin premium does not mean wages are frozen. Stayers at 3.6% and switchers at 4.4% are both positive nominal growth. The premium answers a narrower question: does changing jobs still beat staying, on the median? When the answer is “barely” or “no,” workers lose the arbitrage that defined 2021–22 bargaining, even if retention raises and schedule bumps keep stayer growth alive.

That distinction matters for compensation teams. A firm that matches outside offers only when employees threaten to leave will see fewer credible threats when the market premium is +0.8 pp rather than +2.6 pp. A firm in leisure or construction still faces a different outside option set than a firm in information technology. National averages obscure both facts.

Caveats and confidence Several limits apply. First, industry and education/age cohort premiums in this post are desk composites, not published Tracker micro cuts — they allocate the disclosed national premium using industry wage-growth ranks, JOLTS quits, and ADP-style differentials. Treat signs and ordering as directional; treat tenth-of-a-point differences as noise. Second, the Tracker switcher definition is local and includes duty/employer changes that are not pure employer hops. Third, 12-month moving averages lag turning points; a sudden layoff wave can take months to fully show in the premium. Fourth, CPS response-rate declines and occasional missing months (including shutdown-related gaps noted by the Atlanta Fed) widen confidence intervals around recent prints. Fifth, ADP and JOLTS are corroborating tapes, not substitutes for the Tracker’s matched-individual methodology.

What to watch next Three prints will tell whether +0.8 pp is a floor or a dead-cat bounce. Watch the Tracker switcher and stayer 12-month medians for another tie or a renewed gap above +1 pp. Watch JOLTS quits for a move back toward 2.2%+ — historically a companion to a fatter premium. Watch industry ADP wage growth for information and professional services: if those stay soft while leisure wage growth holds, the industry split in this dashboard will persist even if the national premium drifts.

For one-line briefings: the switcher-minus-stayer premium compressed from about +2.6 pp at the 2022 peak to zero in May 2025 and only +0.8 pp by mid-2026; leisure, construction, retail, and health still pay switchers ≥1.0 pp, while education is flat and information, professional services, and finance print negative premiums.