Why Job Switchers Got 7% Raises in a Month the US Lost 23,000 Jobs

The July 2026 ADP National Employment Report, released on August 5, 2026, delivered two findings that appear to contradict each other. Private employers across the United States added just 44,000 jobs, a clear slowdown, and the official government figures two days later put private payroll growth even lower at 30,000. At the same time, the people who changed employers collected a 7% median pay increase compared with a year earlier, the biggest jump since August 2025. Fewer doors are opening, and yet the doors that do open are paying better than they have in a year. For anyone weighing a move, that gap is the most useful number in the entire release.

What did the July 2026 ADP report actually show?

ADP reported that private sector employment rose by 44,000 jobs in July 2026. That figure landed well below what forecasters expected. Forbes reported consensus analyst projections of 75,000, while Fox Business put economists' estimates at 70,000. Either way, the actual result came in roughly 37% to 41% short of the mark.

The month before was also weaker than first believed. June's gain was revised down from 98,000 to 95,000. So July did not simply miss a forecast, it extended a cooling trend that had already been quietly marked down. This is a familiar pattern for anyone who followed the February 2026 ADP report, when private payrolls added 63,000 in what looked like a frozen labor market, and it echoes the April 2026 reading on private employment and small business jobs.

The scale of the underlying data matters when judging how much weight to give the number. ADP draws on anonymized weekly payroll records covering over 26 million private sector employees in the United States, and its Pay Insights measure captures over 15 million individual pay change observations each month. This is not a survey of a few thousand households. It is a direct read of actual paychecks, which is precisely why the pay side of the report deserves more attention than the headline job count usually gets.

Why did job-changers get a 7% raise when hiring slowed?

The pay data splits workers into two groups. People who stayed in the same job saw median annual pay rise 4.4% year over year, holding steady from the prior month. People who moved to a new employer saw median annual pay rise 7.0%, the largest year-over-year increase since August 2025.

That is a gap of 2.6 percentage points between staying and switching. On a $70,000 salary, the difference between a 4.4% raise and a 7% raise is roughly $1,800 in a single year, and that gap compounds because every future raise is calculated from the higher base.

Dr. Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP, offered a direct explanation for the split. "Job-changers are highly sensitive to real-time economic conditions, and their rapid pay growth implies supply constraints in parts of the labor market," Richardson said in the release, adding that "typical hiring patterns, meanwhile, are changing as employers react to shifting macro-economic conditions".

Read plainly, that means employers are not hiring broadly, but where they genuinely need someone, they are struggling to find that person and are paying up to close the deal. Scarcity of open roles and scarcity of qualified candidates can exist in the same month, in different corners of the same economy. That is the condition this report describes, and it is the reason a slow market can still reward a well-targeted move. It is also the mechanism behind the loyalty tax that long-tenured workers pay in lost raises.

Which industries are still hiring right now?

All of July's net growth came from the service side of the economy. Service-providing industries added 47,000 jobs while goods-producing industries shed 3,000.

Within services, one sector did the heavy lifting. Education and health services added 36,000 jobs, which is more than 80% of the entire national gain. Financial activities added 10,000, professional and business services added 9,000, other services added 6,000, and information added 5,000.

The concentration is striking. If you strip out education and health services, the rest of the private economy produced only 8,000 net jobs across every other industry combined. For a job seeker, that is not an abstract statistic. It says that the probability of finding an opening depends heavily on which sector you are searching in, and that a search targeting healthcare, hospitals, clinics, schools, or universities is operating in a fundamentally different market than a search targeting hospitality or logistics.

This continues a run that has held for months. Readers tracking the highest paying nursing careers and their salary paths in 2026 are watching the one sector that has kept adding jobs while the rest of the economy stalled.

Which industries are shedding jobs?

Three areas lost ground in July 2026. Leisure and hospitality shed 11,000 jobs, trade, transportation and utilities lost 8,000, and natural resources and mining lost 6,000.

On the goods-producing side, the picture was mixed rather than uniformly bad. Construction added 1,000 jobs and manufacturing added 2,000. Those small gains were not enough to offset the 6,000 decline in natural resources and mining, which is why the goods-producing category finished at negative 3,000 overall.

The leisure and hospitality decline is worth pausing on because July sits in the middle of the summer season, when hospitality employment normally runs hot. A loss of 11,000 jobs in that month is a signal about consumer-facing demand rather than a seasonal quirk, since the ADP figures are seasonally adjusted.

For workers in these three shrinking areas, the practical implication is that internal moves and lateral transfers will be harder to come by, and that the switcher premium showing up in the national pay data is unlikely to be available inside their own industry. Anyone in that position should read the sector map before assuming a raise is negotiable, and should factor in the broader slowdown in wage growth captured by the Q2 2026 Employment Cost Index.

Does company size change your odds of getting hired?

It does, and the July 2026 breakdown is more revealing than the headline suggests. Small establishments with 1 to 49 employees added 23,000 jobs, medium establishments with 50 to 499 employees added 8,000, and large establishments with 500 or more employees added 13,000.

Inside the small business category the split is sharper still. Businesses with 1 to 19 employees added 27,000 jobs, while businesses with 20 to 49 employees actually lost 4,000. The very smallest employers were the single largest source of net hiring in the country last month.

Firm size also shaped what workers earned for staying. Among job-stayers, median annual pay growth ran at just 2.4% at businesses with 1 to 19 employees, 4.0% at those with 20 to 49, 4.7% at those with 50 to 249, and 4.8% at both the 250 to 499 and 500-plus categories.

That produces an uncomfortable trade-off worth naming clearly. The smallest employers are opening the most doors, and they are also delivering the weakest raises to the people who stay. A small company may be the fastest route into a job right now, but it is the slowest route to a rising salary once you are there, which makes the negotiation at the offer stage unusually important.

Where in the country is hiring still happening?

The regional split in July 2026 was lopsided. The Northeast added 37,000 jobs, the South added 9,000, the West added 7,000, and the Midwest lost 9,000.

Breaking those down further, New England contributed 16,000 and the Mid-Atlantic 21,000. In the South, the West South Central region added 15,000 and the East South Central added 2,000, but the South Atlantic lost 8,000. In the West, the Pacific added 11,000 while the Mountain region lost 4,000. The Midwest decline was driven by the East North Central region at negative 11,000, partly offset by 2,000 in the West North Central.

The Northeast alone accounted for roughly 84% of the national net gain. For remote-flexible candidates, that concentration is an argument for widening a search geographically rather than deepening it locally. For candidates tied to a Midwest metro, it is a reason to expect a longer search and to plan accordingly, a reality reflected in reporting that recruiters have doubled the time they spend on calls during the 2026 job search slowdown.

Is staying in your job actually costing you money?

The July 2026 numbers make that question concrete rather than rhetorical. Job-stayers received 4.4% while job-changers received 7.0%. Staying is not free, and the price is visible in the data.

Pay growth for stayers also varied by industry. Financial activities led at 5.2% and manufacturing followed at 5.0%. Construction came in at 4.5%, trade, transportation and utilities and leisure and hospitality both at 4.4%, and professional and business services, education and health services, and other services all at 4.1%. Natural resources and mining and information were lowest at 4.0%.

Notice that even the best-paying industry for loyal workers, financial activities at 5.2%, still trailed the 7.0% national figure for people who moved. In July 2026 there was no industry where staying beat switching on median pay growth.

That does not mean everyone should resign. It means the cost of staying is now measurable, and it should be weighed openly against the risk of moving into a market that is producing fewer openings overall. Many workers are already running this calculation, which is what the trend toward nearly half of workers job hunting in 2026 as job hugging cracks describes, even as others settle into the great hunkering down, when workers stopped quitting.

How did the official jobs report compare?

ADP's report is a private measure and it is released ahead of the official federal figures, so it is often treated as a preview. It is not a forecast, and the two data sets regularly disagree because they measure different populations with different methods.

That comparison is no longer hypothetical. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its July report on Friday, August 7, 2026. Total nonfarm payrolls fell by 23,000 against economists' estimates of an 85,000 gain, and the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1% from 4.2%. But the headline hides the split that matters here. Private payrolls actually rose by 30,000. The decline came from government, which shed 53,000 jobs, with local government education alone down 50,000.

That makes ADP's reading broadly consistent with the government's. On the like-for-like private measure it was 44,000 against the official 30,000, a modest gap in the same direction, not the contradiction the headline suggests. Anyone reading only "the economy lost 23,000 jobs" would draw the wrong conclusion about private hiring. The revisions were the harsher part. May's gain was cut by 66,000, from 129,000 to 63,000, and June's by 37,000, from 57,000 to 20,000, leaving those two months a combined 103,000 lower than previously reported. The labor force participation rate held at 61.4%, and average hourly earnings rose 2 cents to $37.62, up 3.2% over the year. Workers who followed the June reading, when the US added 57,000 jobs and the hiring slowdown became visible, are now looking at a June that was actually 20,000.

How should you use this data in your job search?

Four practical moves follow from the July 2026 figures.

First, target the sectors that are actually adding headcount. Education and health services produced 36,000 of the 44,000 total, so a search aimed there faces materially better odds than one aimed at leisure and hospitality, which lost 11,000.

Second, treat any offer as the moment your pay is set for years. The 7.0% figure for job-changers is a median, which means half of movers did better. That number is the benchmark to walk in with, and the tactics in how to negotiate a job offer and salary negotiation tactics that work in 2026 are what convert a benchmark into a signed number.

Third, do not expect your current employer to match it. Stayer pay growth held at 4.4%, and a modest internal raise is now the default rather than the exception, as the pattern of smaller and more selective pay raises in 2026 shows.

Fourth, widen the map. With the Northeast at 37,000 and the Midwest at negative 9,000, geography is doing real work in determining who gets interviews. Metaintro tracks openings across regions and sectors so a search can follow the hiring rather than the headlines.

What are the risks of chasing the switcher premium?

The 7.0% figure is genuinely attractive, but it comes with conditions that the headline hides.

The premium reflects supply constraints in specific parts of the labor market, not a broad bidding war. Richardson tied the rapid pay growth for job-changers directly to those constraints, which means it is concentrated where employers cannot find the skills they need. A move into an oversupplied field will not carry that premium.

Volume is the second risk. With only 44,000 net private sector jobs added in July 2026 on ADP's count, 30,000 on the government's, and June revised down to 95,000, there are simply fewer landing spots than in a strong market. A longer search is the realistic expectation, and leaving a secure role before an offer is signed carries more downside than it would in a hotter market.

Third, a median is not a promise. Half of job-changers landed below 7.0%, and workers in the three shrinking sectors are unlikely to reach it at all.

The honest reading of this report is that switching still pays better than staying, by a clear margin, but that it takes longer and requires better targeting than it did a year ago. The premium is real. It is just not evenly distributed.

Stay ahead of the market. Metaintro surfaces roles across the sectors that are still hiring, so you can time your move with the data instead of guessing.

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• How to Ask for a Raise
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• Summer Hiring, Small Business Payrolls and What It Means for Job Seekers
• The Real Reasons Workers Are Quitting in 2026
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People Also Asked

Q: How many jobs did the US private sector add in July 2026?

A: Private employers added 44,000 jobs in July 2026 according to the ADP National Employment Report released on August 5, 2026. That came in below forecasts of 70,000 to 75,000, and June's figure was revised down from 98,000 to 95,000.

Q: How much more do job-changers earn than job-stayers right now?

A: ADP's July 2026 Pay Insights data put median annual pay growth at 7.0% for people who changed employers and 4.4% for people who stayed in the same job, a gap of 2.6 percentage points. The 7.0% figure was the largest year-over-year increase for job-changers since August 2025.

Q: Which industry added the most jobs in July 2026?

A: Education and health services added 36,000 jobs in July 2026, more than 80% of the 44,000 national total. Financial activities added 10,000 and professional and business services added 9,000, while leisure and hospitality lost 11,000 and trade, transportation and utilities lost 8,000.