The Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker counts many workers as job switchers only because an occupation or industry code changed, and those codes are often noise. Going back to the survey microdata, I keep only workers aged 25 to 54 who reported a new employer or changed both occupation and industry.

Stacked bar chart, November 2025 to August 2026, splitting each month's gap between the median wage growth of job movers and stayers aged 25 to 54 into contributions from movers aged 25 to 34 (blue), movers aged 35 to 54 (orange) and age mix (grey), with a black line for the gap itself. The gap rises from about 0.2 percentage point at the end of 2025 to 1.16 in August 2026. Through early 2026 the blue bars carry most of it and the orange bars are near or below zero; from March on the orange bars dominate, reaching about 0.84 in August against about 0.19 for blue. A separate bar at the right shows the 2000 to 2019 average: a gap of about 0.7, split roughly equally between blue and orange, with a smaller grey part.

For these movers, median wage growth slid from 7.3% in early 2024 to 4.2% at the end of 2025, then climbed back to 5.0% while stayers slowed to 3.9%: a 1.2-point gap, against a 2000–2019 average of 0.7.

In that 2000–2019 average (the bar on the right), the gap came about equally from movers 25 to 34 (blue) and 35 to 54 (orange). Today movers 35 to 54 contribute more than four times as much as the younger group, roughly three quarters of the gap, while the younger movers’ share is a little below its norm. The samples are small, about 1,400 prime-age movers a year, so read the split as a direction rather than a measurement.