"I should probably just be grateful I have a job."
I hear that sentence almost every week now, usually about ten minutes into a first conversation, usually right after someone has finished describing a job that is slowly wearing them down. They say it like an apology. Like wanting more is in poor taste this year.
It isn't. But I understand where it comes from, and this week I want to talk about what's actually happening, because there's a name for it now, and the name is doing people a disservice.
There's a name for it: job hugging
"Job hugging" is the phrase that took hold this year for staying in a job you'd have left two years ago. Not because it got better. Because leaving feels dangerous.
The numbers behind it are real. MetLife's 2026 Employee Benefit Trends Study found that while 77% of employees intend to stay with their current employer, 56% are staying out of necessity rather than genuine commitment. Nearly a third (31%) said a primary reason for staying is that the uncertain job market makes leaving too risky. The study also found employees' financial confidence has dropped to its lowest level since 2012. It surveyed 2,541 full-time employees and 2,480 HR decision-makers in October 2025.
So when you tell me you feel stuck but you're afraid to move, you are describing the majority experience. More than half the people staying put are doing it out of necessity, not loyalty.
The market taught you this
Here's the part I want you to sit with, because it reframes the guilt.
The quits rate, the share of workers who voluntarily leave a job in a given month, was 1.9% in August 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Roughly 3.1 million people quit that month. At the peak of the Great Resignation in early 2022, that rate was close to 3%. It has now sat at or below 2% for about a year.
That is not millions of individual personality changes. That is a market where fewer jobs are opening, each opening draws a crowd, and everyone can feel it. You didn't get timid. You got accurate. I wrote more about the mechanics of this in Why Is the Job Market So Tough Right Now?, and the short version is that the caution you're feeling is a rational read on real conditions.
It's not you, it's the market.
What staying quietly costs
And both things are true: staying has a price, and most people never see it because it arrives as an absence rather than a loss.
ADP's Pay Insights report for September 2026, released September 30, found that people who changed jobs saw median base pay rise 4.8% year over year, while people who stayed put saw 3.0%. On gross pay (base plus bonuses and commissions) the gap was wider: 7.3% for changers versus 4.4% for stayers. ADP builds those figures from payroll records, more than 14.7 million year-over-year pay comparisons each month.
Call it roughly two points a year on base pay. In one year that's a rounding error you'd never notice. Over five or six years of holding on, compounded, it's a different salary band and a different retirement contribution.
The cost isn't only money. When you stop moving, three other things quietly stop:
- Your evidence stops accumulating. The accomplishments that make a resume persuasive come from new scope. Year four of the same responsibilities reads almost exactly like year two.
- Your network cools. The people who would recommend you change jobs, change companies, and eventually stop being current references.
- Your sense of your own market value drifts. People who haven't interviewed in six years are usually wrong about what they're worth, in both directions.
Sometimes staying is exactly right
I'm not here to talk you into a move. Plenty of my clients should stay this year, and I tell them so.
Staying is the right call when you're genuinely learning something, when the job is funding something that matters more right now, when a reorganization is about to open the role you actually want, or when your life outside work needs the predictability more than your career needs the jump. A stable job during a hard year is not a wasted year.
The problem isn't staying. The problem is staying passively: hugging the job, hoping nobody notices you, and letting your options quietly expire. That's the version that hurts, because if the decision gets made for you, you start from zero with a six-year-old resume.
How to get ready without going anywhere
This is the middle path I recommend to most people, and it costs you nothing but a few hours. You stay. You also stop being unprepared.
- Write down what you did this year, now, while you remember it. Numbers, projects, problems you solved, anything with a result attached. Do it every quarter. This single habit is the difference between a resume that takes one evening and one that takes three weekends of archaeology.
- Keep your own copies of the things only your employer has. Reviews, commendations, project summaries, your current job description. I made the full list in What to Keep in Your Own Files Before Anything Goes Wrong, and the reason it matters is simple: the day you lose access is the day you need it.
- Get the resume current while there's no deadline. A resume built calmly, against real job postings you'd actually want, is a far better document than one built in a panic. That's the whole reason my resume writing process starts with your real target postings. We test it against the jobs and the software that screens them, rather than guessing.
- Make your LinkedIn profile findable before you need it. If you want recruiters to surface you instead of you chasing them, the profile has to do the work. Run through the 10-point LinkedIn audit and start there, or have your LinkedIn profile rebuilt properly.
- Have two conversations a month. Not applications. Conversations: a former colleague, someone doing the job you're curious about. This is how people learn what's actually open, and it keeps your network warm with no risk to your current role.
- Take one real interview a year, even when you're content. It is the only honest way to find out what the market thinks you're worth, and it's a skill that rusts fast.
Do those things and you've converted job hugging into something much better: staying by choice, with the door unlocked.
If you've been stuck longer than you meant to be
Sometimes the stuck feeling isn't about this job at all. It's that the path you're on stopped fitting you a few years ago and you've been too busy to say it out loud.
That's a different conversation, and it's the one I've been having with people for more than 25 years. I started out as a career counselor, long before I ever wrote resumes, and the question I still ask first is not "where should you apply" but "what are we actually solving." If you're unsure which of those you need, I've written about the difference between coaching and counseling, and if the answer is the bigger question, that's what career counseling is for.
You're allowed to be grateful for a steady job and still want a better one. Those have never been in conflict.
If this year has you holding on tighter than you'd like, you're welcome to book a complimentary discovery call and we'll look at where you actually stand.