ADP^® Pay Insights

Upcoming reports:

November 05, 2025
December 03, 2025

DATA SOURCE

Pay Insights is based on the payroll data of private employers.

We track the same cohort of workers over 12-month intervals to compute each individual's year-over-year change in pay. This matching process results in more than 14.8 million pay change observations each month. From these observations, we calculate the median year-over-year pay change for job-stayers and job-changers.

Each month, we use the payroll data of more than 13.8 million U.S. job-stayers to estimate national median annual pay change.

Salaried workers make up about 39 percent of our job-stayers sample; hourly wage workers comprise about 61 percent.

DEFINITIONS

Pay Insights tracks gross pay, which includes overtime, tips, bonuses, and commissions in addition to salary and hourly wages.

A job is a unique pairing of an individual worker to their specific employer.

If a job (the same unique worker-employer pairing) appears both in the current month and 12 months prior, its associated year-over-year pay change is included in the job-stayers calculation. This calculation might capture a de minimis number of workers who changed jobs within the 12-month window but have returned to their earlier job in the current month. Each month, we measure more than 13.8 million job-stayers.

If a worker holds multiple jobs during a single month, we measure the job with the highest rate of pay for that month.

Sub-segments such as demographics, industry, and employer size are based on job-stayer data. These categories do not include job-changer data.

While our report focuses on the pay trajectories of job-stayers, we also track pay for a smaller set of job-changers. We can track only job-changers whose previous and current employers both are ADP clients.

Pay Insights matches individual workers with their current job pay and their pay from 12 months earlier. If a worker's employer has changed over this period, we consider this person a job-changer. Each month, we measure more than 1 million job-changers.

Our pay measures are job-based, that is, based on a unique pairing of an individual worker and their employer.

For each job, we observe actual total pay over the preceding 12 months to compute annual pay. If a job is paid only part of the year, we estimate an annual equivalent is using the observed pay rate.

We choose to calculate annual pay for the following reasons.

1. Hourly estimates are challenging if the hours associated with the pay amount are not available.
2. A longer period of observation can eliminate short-term fluctuations in pay. For example, a bonus paid during a particular month will overstate a worker’s usual pay. A 12-month trailing measure of total pay not only smooths monthly variations, it also captures the full pay picture for the year.

Once individual annual pay is estimated, we observe annual pay for each worker-employer pair in both the current month and 12 months earlier. This matching process results in more than 14.8 million individual pay-change observations each month.

We calculate each individual’s pay growth, then take the median of the observations as the aggregate year-over-year change.

Geographic data is based on the primary location of the job, not the location of the worker.

Based on 2024 average