It may be the era of the Big Stay or, depending on who you ask, the Great Talent Stagnation, in which workers just can’t come up with the skills employers are desperately seeking. But that doesn’t mean those workers are willing to jump ship for just any old job.
In fact, the salary that Americans say they need to change jobs has jumped to a record $81,822, according to a recent survey from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That’s a roughly 8% increase from a year ago and the highest figure in the decade that the New York Fed has been tracking this question as part of its periodic Survey of Consumer Expectations.
But pay expectations are very different among different groups of workers—and they are greatest among young, college-educated men who are already making above-average pay, according to the survey.
For workers making over $60,000, the lowest pay they say they’ll need to change jobs (known in economic terms as the “reservation wage”) is nearly $100,000, almost double the $51,000 workers making under $60,000 say they’d need to jump ship. And male workers put their reservation wage at $95,500, far more than the $66,300 average pay women workers say they’d need.
While men’s pay expectations have always been higher than women’s (according to a multitude of surveys), the nearly $30,000 difference is the largest the male-female gap has been in the decade that the Survey of Consumer Expectations has been conducted.
To be sure, workers’ wishes are not the same thing as reality. In the same survey, workers who were expecting a job offer said they expected pay of $70,000 on average ($82,000 for men compared to $57,000 for women.) And in the U.S. Overall, a household makes $74,000 a year, on average.
So what might explain the sudden demand for much higher pay? Blame the rising cost of living, which is driving more and more workers to say they’re worried about issues like income, retirement and health care costs, according to a recent Franklin Templeton survey. This year, financial health eclipsed issues like physical and mental health, the survey found. And while pay has always been one of the major reasons workers work, the cost-of-living crisis has given it renewed salience.
“This year in particular the concept of more compensation came out loud and clear,” Jacque Reardon, head of client marketing for retirement, insurance, 529 and wealth management at the company, told Investment News. “I do think inflation has a lot to do with that.”
