The Pay Report
The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Wage Growth Tracker shows that median wage growth for workers who changed jobs rose to 5.0% in August, from 4.4% in July. The comparable figure for workers who stayed with their employer held at 3.6%, and the overall tracker edged up to 4.1% from 3.8%. The update, published September 10, produces a visible spread between switchers and stayers. It does not mean an individual applicant can expect a 5% raise from accepting a new offer, or that switching causes higher wages for everyone who does it.
A wider gap than in recent years
The move stands out against recent history. In the Atlanta Fed’s published data, the 5.0% switcher reading is the highest since June 2024, when it was 5.3%, and every month from July 2024 through July 2026 was below 5%. The 1.4-percentage-point gap between switchers and stayers is the widest since March 2023. The switcher series climbed quickly this year, from 3.7% in May to 4.1% in June, 4.4% in July and 5.0% in August. A year earlier, in August 2025, the overall tracker was 4.0%, stayers 3.7% and switchers 4.5%.
What the tracker measures
The tracker follows individuals observed in the Current Population Survey 12 months apart and calculates the median change in their hourly wage, using methodology developed at the San Francisco Fed. It is a measure of nominal wage growth for matched workers, and the headline figures are three-month moving averages. The Atlanta Fed notes that the survey sample was about 10% smaller in November and December 2025, widening the uncertainty around those months, and that October 2025 is missing because of the federal government shutdown.
A person weighing a specific offer should therefore resist applying the national median to a particular industry, job title or Atlanta neighborhood. The tracker is national despite being published in Atlanta; local and occupational details are not interchangeable with it.
Who switches matters
There is also a selection issue. People who move employers are not a random cross-section of everyone who might like a new job. They may differ in experience, industry, bargaining power, hours or access to vacancies. The measured premium describes the people who actually switched, not an experiment showing what would have happened to comparable stayers had they moved. Employers using the statistic in workforce planning should compare actual offers and turnover for the roles they need.
The tracker is most useful alongside official turnover data. July’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey recorded a 1.9% quits rate and 5.1 million hires. A widening pay gap can coexist with subdued movement if relatively few workers land the opportunities that command the largest increases. Separately, BLS tenure data released September 24 show that the share of workers who had been with their employer a year or less—a group that includes voluntary job changers—fell to 20.6% in January 2026 from 22.2% two years earlier.
For a worker, the decision remains broader than the headline: benefits, schedule stability, commute, advancement and the likelihood of sustained employment all affect the value of an offer. For an employer, a national wage-growth gap is a prompt to investigate local retention risk, not a substitute for a role-level compensation study. The tracker is usually updated by the second Friday of the month.
Sources
- Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Wage Growth Tracker (updated September 10, 2026) and downloadable data. https://www.atlantafed.org/research-and-data/data/wage-growth-tracker
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Job Openings and Labor Turnover — July 2026,” September 1, 2026. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employee Tenure in 2026,” September 24, 2026. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm
Featured photo: The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta building in Midtown Atlanta, publisher of the Wage Growth Tracker. Photo: Marc Merlin, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Cropped from the original.
