Conversation starter: Does money buy loyalty?

Key findings:

We all know the adage “Money can’t buy happiness,” but is that true at work? After all, one of the best ways to get someone to agree to work for or stay at a company is to throw a little extra compensation their way. Although this may get people to happily accept an initial job offer, is it enough to keep employees around further down the line? Is there something similar to the honeymoon effect across compensation levels, where the happiness from a pay bump is short lived?

To address this question, we compared Glassdoor users’ self-reported compensation with the expected compensation for their role given their job title, location, where they are working, and years of experience, based on Glassdoor’s salary estimates model. Those who have a salary that is at least 15% higher than expected are classified as “well-compensated,” those who have a salary that is at least 15% lower than expected are classified as “under-compensated,” and workers in the middle are “fairly-compensated.”

Well-compensated employees’ grass really is greener

Looking across reviews from 2024 and 2025, on average well-compensated employees rate their employers the highest, followed by fairly-compensated and then under-compensated. In fact, 71% of well-compensated workers gave their employer a 4- or 5-star overall rating, over 10 percentage points higher than under-compensated workers. This double digit gap between well- and under-compensated employees widens to 19 percentage points for “compensation & benefits”, indicating well-compensated employees are aware of their distinction. However, all the other workplace factors still reflect this rose-tinted glasses sentiment, ranging from “career opportunities” with the largest difference at 11 percentage points and all others with “only” a 5-7 percentage point difference.

This difference in rating between well-compensated workers and under-compensated workers is even more stark when we drill down into different sectors. Hotels & Travel Accommodation has an astounding 16 percentage point difference between the share of well-compensated and under-compensated employees who are overall satisfied (defined here as providing a 4- or 5-star rating), followed closely by Nonprofit & NGO and Insurance with a 14 percentage point gap.

One reason for this gap for Hotels & Travel Accommodation employees could be due to them often working on commission. This means that any work-related problems can be exacerbated by receiving lower compensation at the end of the day. This is seen by under-compensated users in this group being one of the lowest paid industries in the sampled data.

Meanwhile, Aerospace & Defense has the lowest difference (7%), which is primarily driven by the percent of under-compensated employees giving a 4- or 5- star reviews. Aerospace & Defense is one of the highest paying industries for both well-compensated and under-compensated sampled users. Thus, under-compensated employees are still getting enough to get by, even if they are not making as much as their industry peers.

Hotels & Travel Accommodation has the largest gap in well-compensated and under-compensated workers who are satisfied; Aerospace & Defense has the smallest

Tough job markets impact under-compensated workers harder than well-compensated workers

Has work always been significantly better for well-compensated workers? Zooming back out, we see there has been a noticeable decrease in well-compensated employees’ ratings, which peaked during 2020 to 2022 at 4.07 stars, then consistently decreased year-over-year until 2026 where the average is 3.54 stars. However, this trend is consistent with fairly- and under-compensated workers as well, suggesting that this decrease is due to global factors rather than specifically targeting well-compensated workers. Notably, the gap between under- and well-compensated user ratings has widened by 35% between 2020 and 2025, meaning this depression in scores has more greatly affected under-compensated workers than well-compensated workers. As the job market has softened, under-compensated workers are feeling especially dissatisfied with their jobs. 

Job searches: Money only helps retain happy talent

Not only is compensation able to influence better reviews, it also appears to deter workers from shopping around for a new job. Job searches during 2024 and 2025 show that well-compensated workers are the least likely to apply for more jobs out of the three talent groups. Job seekers who were categorized as well-compensated paid looked at 13% fewer jobs than under-compensated. Further, well-compensated job seekers were 20% less likely than under-compensated job seekers to apply for a job on Glassdoor while fairly-compensated job seekers were only 5% less likely to apply than under-compensated. 

But well-compensated workers may simply be less likely to apply for new jobs because they are more satisfied, as shown in previous Glassdoor research that found satisfied workers are half as likely to apply for new jobs as unsatisfied workers. Indeed, in the previous section, well-compensated employees’ ratings indicate that they are the most satisfied out of the three groups. Thus, to control for this, we identify users who leave a positive review (overall score of 4- or 5-stars) as “satisfied” and users who leave a negative review (overall score of 1- or 2-stars) as “unsatisfied.”

Looking at only satisfied well-compensated job seekers, we see that the roughly same percentage (within a 2% margin) of users apply for jobs regardless of which subrating they are satisfied with. This means that no one particular subrating stands out for making satisfied well-compensated employees more or less likely to look for a new job.

When comparing satisfied under-compensated workers to satisfied well-compensated workers, we see the former applies for 9% more jobs than the latter. Interestingly, unsatisfied well-compensated users apply to 10% more jobs than the satisfied well-compensated users.

Thus, if an employee is well-compensated and satisfied with any aspect of their job, they are the most likely to stay. However, if they are severely unsatisfied overall, they are as much of a flight risk as an underpaid employee who, while being happy with their job overall, may see that they could do better compensation-wise thanks to mandatory salary disclosures in job postings.

Conclusion

We have seen through employee reviews that money can buy happier employees. This happiness is not temporary either, with well-compensated users much less likely to be an active job seeker compared to their fairly- and under-compensated counterparts. Thus, one of the best ways for companies to retain talent really is to throw money at the problem.

Methodology

A sample of Glassdoor users were categorized into well-compensated, fairly-compensated, and under-compensated pay based on salary information provided between January 2018 and March 2026. In order to define these categories, we compared users’ self-reported salary against a Glassdoor estimate of the median salary for a worker with those characteristics (job title, location, employer, employer’s sector, and years of experience). Users with a self-reported salary more than 15% above the median predicted salary for their characteristics are considered well-compensated, less than 15% below the median predicted salary for their characteristics are considered under-compensated, and the remainder are fairly-compensated.

Additionally, users were only included in the sample if they left an approved Glassdoor review within two years of submitting their compensation information. Job search rates were calculated using job applications started on Glassdoor by these users to U.S.-based jobs during all of 2024 and 2025.