The Switch-Premium Score, to Search Now, Hold, or Press Internally

You are weighing whether to launch a job search for a raise or stay where you are, and you want to know whether switching will actually pay in your field. This guide is for anyone who has read that changing jobs buys a 10 to 20 percent raise and wants to know if that number is true for them. It gives you a repeatable score: pull your field's current switch premium, convert a likely offer into a net comparable number, and land on one of three verdicts - search now, hold, or press internally.

The reason this guide exists is that the headline number is a national average, and the national average hides almost everything that matters. The job-switcher premium currently runs strongly positive in resources, mining, and construction, and negative in parts of IT and hospitality. A single number read off a top-ranking page can flip your decision in the wrong direction. The fix is to work from the per-field series and then net it against your own move math.

What is the switch-premium score

The switch-premium score is a three-verdict judgement you reach by comparing your field's current switcher-minus-stayer wage gap to your own net move math. It answers one repeated question: does switching pay enough, right now, in my field, for me specifically?

The score has two inputs. The first is market: what the public wage-growth series say switchers in your sector are getting over stayers this month. The second is personal: what you would net after subtracting everything you forfeit by leaving. You run both, then read the result against a published threshold band. The output is a decision with a re-check date, not a statistic.

The score matters because two readers in the same month, with the same salary, can reach opposite verdicts. One is a construction project manager with no unvested equity; the other is a software engineer four years into a six-year vesting cliff. The market gap and the forfeiture both move, and you cannot read either off a blog's headline.

A single national switch-premium number is useless for a specific decision in a specific field.

The dimensions that drive the score

Four dimensions decide whether switching pays. Score each one before you project an offer, because any single one can sink an otherwise attractive move.

• Field gap. The current switcher-minus-stayer wage growth in your sector. This is the ceiling on what a switch can realistically buy you.
• Source definition. Whether you are reading a base-pay or gross-pay series, because the two produce very different gaps in the same month.
• Forfeiture load. What you lose by leaving now: unvested equity, unvested 401(k) match, an unpaid bonus, a PTO payout, a coverage gap.
• Market thickness. How many employers in your field are bidding, which determines how easily a positive field gap turns into a real offer.

Each dimension proves something, and each can lie. The field gap proves the market is paying switchers more, but it lies when you read a 3-month smoothed average that is hiding a just-started reversal. The forfeiture load proves the real cost of leaving, but it lies if you value unvested equity at grant rather than realizable value. Market thickness proves switching liquidity, but it lies if you compare an industry count to a job-title count, which are different query types.

Pull your field's current gap from public data

Start with the two series that publish industry detail: the Atlanta Fed Wage Growth Tracker and ADP Pay Insights. Both are monthly, both are free, and together they bracket your field's real number.

The Atlanta Fed tracker is a median year-over-year percent change computed at the individual level and reported as a 3-month moving average. It breaks out by sector groups: construction and mining; education and health; finance and business services; leisure and hospitality; manufacturing; public administration; and trade and transportation. The stayer and switcher sub-series each run monthly from January 1997, so the gap is computable across roughly 355 observations of history.

ADP Pay Insights tracks more than 14.8 million workers monthly and reports base pay and gross pay growth across worker mobility, sector, employer size, pay quartile, and 56 US metropolitan areas. The key difference: ADP gross pay includes overtime and workforce composition, while the Atlanta Fed uses matched hourly wages. That is why, in the same month, the two disagree by percentage points.

Read the table carefully. In July 2025 the gap went negative, with stayers at 4.1 percent edging out switchers at 4.0 percent - the sixth straight stayer-favoring month, a reversal not seen since 2010. That is the whole point of pulling the current number: the sign itself can flip.

For per-field switcher signs, the strongest public statement is older: resources and mining showed the highest switcher gain at 11.8 percent, while leisure and hospitality was the only sector with negative switcher growth at -1.3 percent. Treat those as range markers, not current readings. They trace to older ADP data, and a current, clean per-industry switcher-minus-stayer table from the Atlanta Fed is downloadable but is not republished per field in press summaries. For a field like IT, the direction - developer pay softening - is supported by Payscale, which projects tech pay increases falling from 4 percent to 3.5 percent, but the precise current IT-negative figure is not established publicly in these sources. Where the number is not published, say so and cross-check the latest sector release yourself rather than inventing one.

Convert a likely offer into a net comparable number

A gross offer is not a comparable number until you subtract everything you forfeit by leaving. The documented method is consistent across finance sources: sum total compensation, then subtract annualized forfeitures and one-time switching costs, and discount any signing bonus to year one only.

The forfeiture that swings most decisions is the 401(k) match. Multiply the employer-funded portion of your balance by your unvested percentage. If the employer-funded portion is worth 20,000 dollars and you are 60 percent vested, you could forfeit about 8,000 dollars by leaving now. A safe-harbor match is a different animal: it is 100 percent vested immediately and cannot be forfeited, so it never enters this math. And in a documented case, a worker at year five of a six-year graded schedule stood to forfeit 74,000 dollars - enough to erase a double-digit raise.

This table, a six-year graded schedule on a 30,000 dollar match, shows why timing matters more than the offer headline. Leaving at year four forfeits 12,000 dollars; waiting to year six forfeits nothing. Your position on the vesting curve, not the raise percentage, is often the deciding variable.

Beyond the match, inventory the rest: forfeited unvested equity (discounted to realizable value, since a new grant may be illiquid or underwater), this year's bonus if you leave before payout, a PTO payout, relocation, and COBRA at roughly 500 dollars per week for family coverage during any coverage gap. Then remember the new employer has its own vesting clock. You escape one cliff and start another, so treat the new match as worth zero until you clear its vesting.

New base salary:                        +$________
New bonus (expected, year one):         +$________
Signing bonus (year one only):          +$________
New equity (realizable, year one):      +$________
New 401(k) match (treat as $0 if unvested): +$0
---
Current base you give up:               -$________
Forfeited unvested 401(k) match:        -$________
Forfeited unvested equity (realizable): -$________
Unpaid current-year bonus:              -$________
Lost PTO payout:                        -$________
COBRA / coverage gap (weeks x $500):    -$________
Relocation and one-time costs:          -$________
---
Net year-one premium ($):               =$________
Net year-one premium (% of current base): =____%

Writing a resume and cover letter tuned to each posting you chase is where a candidate burns the most time before any of this math pays off. Refolk builds your resume from your own history, tailors it to every posting, and scores how well you actually fit, so the applications behind a positive score cost you minutes instead of evenings.

The step-by-step scoring procedure

Run the score in order. The market pull comes first so you are projecting against a real ceiling, then the forfeiture math, then the verdict. Finance sources push the forfeiture math first and negotiation sources lead with the threshold; the order below puts the market number ahead of both so your offer projection is grounded before you net it.

Read the score: search now, hold, or press internally

Your net year-one premium, read against the published threshold band, produces the verdict. The dominant guidance is a 10 to 20 percent boost when changing jobs, with a floor near 5.8 percent; a recruiter benchmark is a minimum of 10 percent above current base to make a move worth serious consideration, with 15 to 25 percent for a genuine step up in scope.

• Search now when your net premium clears the 10 to 20 percent band and your field gap is positive. The market is paying switchers, and your move math survives the forfeitures.
• Hold when your net premium sits below the roughly 5 to 6 percent floor. The offer does not clear the cost of leaving, usually because forfeitures ate it, or because your field gap is thin or negative.
• Press internally when the field gap is thin but you have real offer leverage, or when forfeitures erase a raise that would otherwise clear the band. An internal adjustment avoids resetting your vesting clock and opening a coverage gap.

The verdict is never permanent. Both series are monthly and smoothed, so set a trigger to re-pull after the next release. ADP, for instance, publishes on a fixed schedule - its October report was scheduled for November 4 at 8:15 a.m. ET - so you always know when a fresh reading lands.

How the score goes wrong

Most bad switch decisions come from a handful of repeatable errors, and each has a cheap check. This is the part worth re-reading before you act, because a false positive here costs you a reset vesting clock and a coverage gap for nothing.

The first and the last share a root: both treat a published number as if it described this month and your field. The premium is mean-reverting toward about 0.7 percentage points, which is why the 2021 to 2022 peak near 14 to 16 percent was a one-off tied to record openings. Bank of America had already measured the job-change premium falling to roughly 4 percent median by January 2025, down from about 14 percent in 2022. If your mental anchor is still 2022, every score you run will be too optimistic.

Market thickness and how to test it

Thickness is how many employers are bidding for your title, and it decides whether a positive field gap is realizable or merely theoretical. A hot gap does you no good if only three employers hire your specialty in your city. The same title can offer very different switching liquidity across markets.

Refolk's index makes this concrete. In Refolk's index of professional profiles there are 352,540 US software engineers against 43,827 in the UK - an 8.0x ratio. More bodies in the pool is a proxy for more employers bidding, which means a positive switch premium is easier to realize in the deeper market. The hospitality industry shows 1,023,895 US professionals in the same index, a very thick pool, though recall that hospitality is exactly the sector where published switcher growth has run negative - thickness and premium are different things.

One caution on this table: the title rows and the industry row are different query types, so compare within a type, not across. The US-to-UK software engineer ratio is a fair comparison; the hospitality count is not comparable to either, because it counts an industry, not a job title.

To test thickness for your own field before you commit to a search, look at how many people with your exact profile recently switched into the kind of employer you want. A live search of recent movers tells you whether the switching path you are counting on is well-trodden or rare.

Keep the score current

A switch-premium score is only as good as its freshness date, so treat it as a living read rather than a one-time calculation. Both headline series update monthly and both smooth over three months, which means a reading can lag a genuine turning point by weeks. Re-pull on each release and re-score before you make an irreversible move.

What to do next depends on your verdict. If you scored search now, open the applications while the gap holds, because a smoothed series means the window may already be narrowing. If you scored hold, set a calendar trigger for the next release and bank any vesting milestone you are approaching. If you scored press internally, bring the net math - not the national headline - to the conversation, because your employer can check the same public series you did. In all three cases, the discipline is the same: re-pull the number, re-net the offer, and let the score, not the headline, decide.