For two years the safe move was to stay put. Recruiters gave it a name, “job hugging”: keep the job you have, don’t test a shaky market, wait it out. A lot of employer planning quietly assumed it would hold, that a nervous workforce is a loyal one that doesn’t need a raise to stay.

The assumption is cracking. Morgan McKinley’s 2026 Workplace Trends Report, which surveyed roughly 2,800 employees and 200 employers, found that 49% of employees plan to actively look for a new job in the next six months (Morgan McKinley, 2026 Workplace Trends Report). Half the workforce, hands coming off the job they were supposedly hugging.

Their employers are reading the same room differently. In the same survey, 63% said they expect no reduction in headcount in 2026 (Morgan McKinley) — stability from the corner office, stagnation from the desk.

The pay math behind the restlessness

Ask why now, and the survey answers itself. Nearly 70% of employees received no pay increase in the first half of 2026, up from 65% a year earlier (Silicon Republic).

Job hugging was always a trade: accept flat pay for the safety of staying. Two years in, the pay is still flat, groceries are not, and the safety half of the bargain thins out with every layoff headline. A frozen paycheck reads differently in year two than in year one. By year two it stops looking like caution and starts looking like a decision someone else made about your worth.

The second gap employers won and may come to regret

Pay is the trigger. Flexibility is the accelerant, and here employers spent the year winning a fight that may cost them the war for talent.

The report has 47% of employers requiring more than three office days a week, while 45% of employees would prefer just one or two (Morgan McKinley). That gap would matter less if flexibility were a nice-to-have. It isn’t: 64% of employees said flexible work directly affects whether they accept or decline a job, and 70% ranked working from home as their single most valued benefit (Morgan McKinley).

So the companies that tightened attendance while skipping raises have handed their departing staff a shopping list. And the employers who see it coming are already bidding on exactly those terms: 59% describe hiring as competitive, 49% name flexible work as a key way to attract talent, and 45% point to career growth (Morgan McKinley). The counteroffers your best people are about to receive are built from the two things you stopped offering them.

Trayc Keevans, Morgan McKinley’s global FDI director and head of research, put the risk in one line: employers “confuse a stable workforce plan with a settled workforce” (Silicon Republic). The quiet isn’t loyalty. It’s a queue.

What to do with it, whichever side you’re on

If you manage people and you’ve held pay flat for two years while adding office days, treat that half-the-workforce figure as a headcount forecast, not a mood. The unglamorous fix — a real pay review and a defensible flexibility policy — is cheaper than backfilling a third of your team at market rate once the counteroffers start.

If you’re one of the half planning to look, the thing to know is that you’re moving at the same time as everyone else, so timing is the whole advantage. The market rewards whoever is ready before the wave, not whoever wants it most. Work out your number first — what a move actually has to clear to be worth it after the raise you’d forgo by staying, and after tax if the next role is contract rather than salaried. If it might be contract, the freelance rate calculator and the 1099 tax estimator will tell you what a headline offer is really worth once self-employment tax comes out of it.

The one-line version: this is a market, not a mood. Half the workforce is set to test it at the same moment, and the raise you’ve been owed for two years is now something you may have to switch jobs to collect. Whoever runs the number first, moves first.