Changing jobs still pays more. Two trackers cannot agree how much.

Two rulers, one month

A single sentence has been circulating all summer: job-hopping pays less than it used to, and staying put has caught up. It is half true, and which half depends entirely on which measure you quote.

ADP builds its figure from the pay of the workers who run through its payroll systems each month. On that data, someone who changed jobs in July 2026 earned 7.0% more than a year earlier, while someone who stayed earned 4.4%. The distance between them, 2.6 points, was the widest since August 2025 - by this ruler the reward for moving is not shrinking, it is opening back up.

The Atlanta Fed builds its figure differently. It takes the government's monthly household survey, matches the same person to themselves a year apart, and reports the median of those individual changes. On that data, July's changers were up 4.4% and stayers 3.6% - a premium of 0.8 of a point, a quarter of the size. Same month, same question, and a gap that is either substantial or nearly gone.

Why two honest measures disagree

They are not measuring the same people. ADP sees everyone on the payrolls it processes; the Atlanta Fed sees a sample of households. And they are not doing the same arithmetic: ADP tracks the change in pay across a population, while the Atlanta Fed reports the median of person-by-person twelve-month changes, which is far less moved by a handful of very large raises at the top.

That single methodological difference explains most of the gap. A market where a small number of movers win outsized raises will look hotter to a mean-leaning payroll measure than to a median of matched individuals. Neither is wrong. They are answers to slightly different questions, and the honest thing is to say which question you asked.

What both agree on is direction: in July both trackers ticked up, and in both the mover still out-earns the stayer. The disagreement is only about size - and size is the whole of what a "job-hopping is dead" headline claims to know.

What it changes for someone deciding whether to move

Set this beside the rest of the week. The premium for moving, on either measure, is a reward you can only collect if a move is available - and the same month's hiring rate, the subject of yesterday's edition, says fewer moves are. A larger premium on fewer openings is not the same opportunity as a smaller premium on many.

This desk belongs to a company that builds a job app, so the useful thing is to be exact about what that does and does not settle. We can show you the roles open to you and score each one before you apply; we cannot tell you what raise a given move would carry, and no wage tracker can tell you that for your case either. What the two numbers above can do is stop you treating "movers get 7%" or "the premium is gone" as a fact about your next decision. It is a fact about a ruler.