The Switcher Premium Is Back.

One of the charts I like to look at from time to time is the gap between wage growth for job switchers and job stayers in the Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker. Almost always, switchers come out ahead — changing jobs is how workers capture a raise, and the switcher line sits comfortably above the stayer line through most of the past 25 years.

But every so often that relationship inverts. In 2024–2025, wage growth for job stayers climbed above wage growth for job switchers — a genuine rarity, visible only a couple of times in the series.

The mechanism is timing. New-hire wages are the flexible margin of the labor market: they reprice quickly when conditions change, in both directions. Incumbent wages move with a lag — annual reviews, sticky pay structures, the friction of renegotiating with people already on the payroll. So when wage growth decelerates rapidly, the switcher line falls first and fastest. In the sharpest episodes, it drops clean below the stayer line, and for a stretch the safest raise was the one you got by staying put.

Since then, things have normalized. Switcher wage growth has plateaued slightly above 4%, which is perhaps the main news here, while stayer growth has kept grinding lower, restoring the usual order.