Issue 25 · Thursday, 18 June 2026
The standard advice about counteroffers is that you should never accept one, because you will be gone within a year anyway. The standard advice is repeated most loudly by recruiters, who are not disinterested parties, and it is wrong often enough to be worth taking apart.
Start with why the counteroffer exists at all. Your employer is not rewarding loyalty. They are comparing two costs. Cost one is the raise. Cost two is the search, the vacancy, the ramp, and the risk that the replacement is worse than you. For a role that took four months to fill the first time, cost two is very large, and a fifteen percent raise is cheap against it.
That is the whole mechanism, and it explains both why counteroffers are generous and why they are fragile. They are priced against replacement cost, not against your value, and replacement cost falls the moment the market softens or the team grows.
Not “should I take it” but “why was I underpaid until I threatened to leave?” There are two honest answers and they lead to different decisions.
One: the band moved and nobody adjusted you, which happens constantly and is a process failure rather than a judgement about you. If that is genuinely what happened, and the correction is real, staying can be entirely rational.
Two: they knew and did not act because you had not made it a problem. That is a statement about how the place works, and it will keep being true. You will have to threaten to leave again in eighteen months, and the second threat is much less effective than the first.
Counteroffer negotiations are the one moment when your leverage is unambiguous, and almost everyone spends all of it on base salary. Base salary is the thing your employer finds easiest to give and easiest to claw back through a thin review cycle.
Consider spending some of that leverage on things that are hard to reverse: a title change written into the system of record, a formal scope change, a move off the on-call rotation, a written commitment to the next review date and what it will consider. These cost the employer little cash and they persist. A title in the HR system follows you to the next employer. A one-off raise does not.
The attrition statistics people quote about counteroffers are mostly folklore, but the underlying observation is sound: if you went as far as a signed offer elsewhere, something was wrong, and money was probably not all of it. If you can name the thing that made you look, and the counteroffer does not touch it, you will be looking again. Write the thing down before the conversation. If it is not on the table afterwards, you have your answer.
Written by Nadia Prewitt. Every issue goes to the list first and lands here a day or two afterwards. There is no tracking pixel in the email and there is none on this page; if you want me to know you read it, tell me.