The Great Stagnation: What HR Leaders Should Do Before the Market Turns

Hiring, quitting, and firing have all settled into a multi-year low — not a downturn, but a holding pattern where almost nobody is moving.

The numbers back it up. According to BLS JOLTS data, the quits rate fell to 1.9% in May 2026 — its lowest point outside the 2020 pandemic shock, down from a 2022 peak near 2.8%. Combined with a 3.3% hires rate and a steady 1.1% layoffs rate, that's a genuine "low-hire, low-fire" equilibrium, not a sudden freeze. Salary.com's 2026 Trust and Pay Report is referring to this period as "The Great Stagnation."

Holding patterns end. What organizations do during this window determines their footing when hiring ultimately picks back up.

The read: Employers are guessing at a question employees have already answered

When Salary.com asked employers whether they'd strengthened trust with their workforce this year, 44.6% said they didn't know — more than the 42.0% who said yes and the 13.4% who said no.

Employees answered the same question more clearly: 57.7% report high trust, versus 18.5% reporting low trust. That's not a workforce quietly job-hunting. It's one that's already settled in, while employers are still guessing.

The uncertainty concentrates in comp teams specifically. Compensation professionals report being unsure at a rate 15 points higher than everyone else (59.0% vs. 44.0%), a reminder that technical precision and day-to-day visibility into employee sentiment are two different jobs.

Managers hold a lever employers haven't picked up: 88.8% of employees trust their direct manager as much as or more than their employer overall. Moving the org-level trust number likely runs through that relationship, not a company-wide campaign. The lever is weakest exactly where it's needed, though — employees who feel unfairly paid are nearly four times as likely to trust their manager less than their employer, compared to employees who feel fairly paid. Trust has to be built before people update their resumes, which makes manager enablement training worth a look, since only 51.6% of organizations currently train managers on compensation conversations at all.

Employers predicted 45.4% of employees would rate their pay as fair. The actual number was higher, at 54.0% — employees are more positive about pay fairness than employers expect.

The underpaid share grew too, from an expected 9.0% to an actual 16.6%, concentrated among individual contributors rather than leadership. Averaging that into one sentiment score would hide it.

Pay transparency follows a similar pattern. Employers were asked whether they share pay ranges proactively, on request, or not at all — but employees' top answer wasn't one of those options. Employees' largest response, at 38.8%, was individualized, role-specific sharing — an option employers weren't even asked about. Transparency behaves more like a spectrum than a switch, which is where a pay transparency policy guide earns its place.

What's coming: The market always turns

Low-hire, low-fire won't last. A shift in the economy, a wave of post-restructuring rehiring, or simply time could reopen the market faster than most organizations expect.

The companies with real footing when that happens will be the ones that used this quieter window to fix what they weren't measuring, equip the managers employees already trust, and close the fairness gaps the data shows are real.

Our recommendations: Spend the quiet window wisely

The report closes with five moves, sequenced from measurement to action. The easiest one to start today: add a direct trust question to your existing engagement or pulse survey. Nearly half of employers can't say whether they're gaining or losing ground with their workforce, and that's not a gap worth leaving to guesswork.

The other four move into manager enablement, fairness-data segmentation, transparency policy, and retention strategy — each tied to a specific number in the data above, and each more useful with the full context behind it.

Knowing where you stand beats assuming it. See your own numbers next to this data via compensation benchmarking.

Get the full 2026 Trust and Pay Report to learn more about trust, fairness, and see our full set of recommendations on how to prepare before the market turns.