The price of staying

ADP’s August 2026 Pay Insights, released September 2, put year-over-year gross pay growth at 7.3 percent for people who changed jobs and 4.4 percent for people who stayed. The gap is 2.9 percentage points. The figures come from payrolls covering more than 26 million US private-sector workers, with about 14.7 million of the same people matched year over year each month.

The reward for moving did not fade

A year ago the numbers looked almost identical. ADP’s August 2025 reading put job switchers at 7.1 percent against 4.4 percent for stayers, a 2.7-point gap. In July 2026 it was 7.0 against 4.4. The gap did not narrow over the past year. It widened slightly, and changer pay growth accelerated.

The collapse happened earlier. Changers posted 16.1 percent growth in August 2022, stayers 7.6 percent, an 8.5-point gap. ADP’s release states pay growth has been decelerating for four years. What is left after that deceleration is a gap that has held near three points for a year, paid only to people who move.

One series supports the comparison

ADP redesigned Pay Insights with this release. It now publishes base pay, a brand-new series drawn from contracted pay rates (changers 4.7 percent, stayers 3.0 percent), and gross pay, which adds bonuses, commissions, tips and other earnings. Gross pay continues the old annual pay series, so it is the only measure that supports comparison over time. Every historical figure above is gross pay.

Almost nobody is collecting it

BLS JOLTS data for July, released September 1, counted 3.1 million quits, a 1.9 percent quits rate, matching the lowest readings of the recovery. The same ADP release showed private-sector employment grew 38,000 in August, the slowest pace since January.

Sentiment matches the behavior. In the New York Fed’s August Survey of Consumer Expectations, roughly 1,300 household heads put the average perceived odds of losing their job in the next 12 months at 13.8 percent, the lowest since February 2026, and the odds of finding a new job if they lost theirs at 45.4 percent. People feel safe where they sit and unsure they could land elsewhere.

What the median does not promise

Two honest limits. ADP’s figures cover its own payroll base, and the changer median describes the people who did move, who are not a random sample of everyone who could. A median is not a promise to any one person.

It is still a price. Staying reads as the careful choice, and this August the market charged 2.9 points for it. CoBlack keeps a search running against openings drawn from employer career pages and ATS feeds, so the choice to move rests on real openings rather than a guess.