When loyalty is rewarded: Top earners who stay in their jobs get much larger pay increases than those who switch
A recent Bank of America study reveals that top earners who remain with their employers receive significantly larger pay increases compared to those who switch jobs. While job-hopping has slowed, younger generations like Gen Z are still benefiting from switching, experiencing higher wage growth than their counterparts who stay. However, older generations, such as Gen X and Baby Boomers, have seen stagnant or declining wages when switching jobs.
- ▪The top 5% of earners who stayed with their employers received year-over-year pay hikes approaching double digits.
- ▪About half of those who stayed in their job and 44% of those who switched jobs saw no pay increase in Q1 2026.
- ▪Gen Z job-hoppers' earnings growth rate was four times that of stayers, while millennials' wage growth was double compared to stayers.
Fortune files mainly under business. We currently carry 644 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Fortune |
| Canonical URL | https://fortune.com/2026/05/30/job-switching-staying-top-earners-pay-hikes-great-resignation/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 30 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-30T08:07:09.128Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-30T08:07:09.128Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | BKkFlNMgPw_p |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
To stay or to go? That’s the perennial question for workers trying to maximize their pay in a “peanut-butter” raise economy. But in the era of job-hopping and freelancing, freedom can come with a cost. Recommended Video For higher earners, loyalty is rewarded. The top 5% of earners who stayed with their employers received year-over-year pay hikes approaching double digits, while peers who switched jobs only saw a low-single-digit bump, according to a Bank of America study using internal deposit data. All other workers—including lower-, middle-, and higher-earners excluding the top 5%—all got a higher after-tax wage increase if they switched. Bank of America Institute That’s if you get a raise at all.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Fortune.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Fortune
