Salary.com Research Finds Employees Who Feel Unfairly Paid Are Five Times More Likely to Say Their Trust in Their Employer Has Declined

WALTHAM, Mass., Aug. 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Salary.com, the global leader in compensation data, software, and AI, today released the 2026 Trust and Pay Report, new research putting parallel questions to 1,051 employers and 975 employees on pay fairness, transparency, and trust. The report’s central finding is a correlation between pay fairness perception and employee trust. Employees who rate their pay as unfair are more than five times as likely to say their trust in their employer has declined over the past year (36.4%) as employees who feel fairly paid (6.6%).

The pattern is not a quirk of this sample. The relationship holds across the full trust scale, not just at the extremes. It is highly significant statistically with a moderate effect size, meaning this is both a real, non-random pattern and a substantial one rather than a technically significant but trivial effect. Salary.com presents the finding as a strong association rather than a causal claim.

How Closely Fairness and Trust Track

• 36.4% of employees who rate their pay as unfair say their trust in their employer declined over the past year, compared with 6.6% of employees who feel fairly paid.
• The same holds on a wider measure. Counting everyone whose trust either fell this year or was already low, 48.1% of employees who feel unfairly paid land in negative territory, versus 7.9% of those who feel fairly paid. Positive trust runs the same direction. 77.5% of employees who feel fairly paid report positive trust, against 19.1% of those who feel unfairly paid.
• Employees who feel neutral about fairness land in between on every measure, with 43.1% reporting high trust, compared with 77.5% in the fair group and 19.1% in the unfair group. Trust moves in step with fairness perception across all three groups.

“Pay fairness and trust are not two separate, unrelated programs. Our latest research shows they are part of the same conversation,” said Amy Dwyer, CHRO at Salary.com. “That connection is easy to miss right now. Quits are at a multi-year low, retention numbers look strong, and a quiet labor market can easily be mistaken for employee loyalty. But employees who perceive their pay as unfair are already losing trust. When hiring picks back up, they may be the first to walk. Building trust in pay fairness takes time and consistent effort, which is why the time to address it is now, while the market is still quiet.”

Employers Are In The Dark

The report finds employers largely unable to say which way trust is moving, which makes the fairness link difficult to act on.

• 44.6% of HR professionals cannot say whether their organization strengthened trust with its workforce over the past year, a larger share than the 42.0% who said yes and far larger than the 13.4% who said no.
• The uncertainty is even more prevalent within the compensation function. Compensation management professionals report being unsure at 59.0%, 15 percentage points higher than all other HR roles.
• Employees answered the same question clearly. 81.5% report moderate or high trust in their employer, with 57.7% in the high trust group. The problem is not that trust is collapsing. It is that employers are not measuring it and are therefore certainly not measuring what is having an impact on increasing or decreasing trust.

Employers Are Misreading How Employees Experience Pay Fairness

The report reveals that employers are misreading where employees actually sit when it comes to their perceptions of pay fairness.

• Employees are more positive than employers expect. 54.0% of employees rate their pay as fair (a 4 or 5 on a 1 to 5 scale), higher than the 45.4% employers predicted would land in that favorable range. Employees are generally more positive than employers give them credit for.
• But employers also underestimate the size of the unhappy minority. The unfavorable group grew from an expected 9.0% to an actual 16.6%, nearly double what employers anticipated. Both facts are true at once, and a single average sentiment score hides them both.
• Plus, the perception gap isn’t distributed across seniority. Individual contributors make up 58.6% of employees who feel unfairly paid but only 31.5% of those who feel fairly paid. Senior leaders make up 1.2% of the unfair group and 32.1% of the fair group.

Two Levers That Do Not Require Raising Payroll

For organizations already paying competitively, the data points to two places where fairness perception moves without additional spend.

• Managers. 88.8% of employees trust their direct manager as much as or more than their employer overall, but only 51.6% of organizations train managers specifically on compensation conversations, compared with 69.2% that train them on performance evaluations. The manager advantage is weakest exactly where it is needed most: employees who feel unfairly paid are nearly four times as likely to trust their manager less than their employer (24.7% versus 6.6%).
• Transparency. 46.3% of employees who feel unfairly paid say their employer does not share pay range information at all, versus 9.9% of employees who feel fairly paid. Employees also do not experience transparency as on or off. The largest single category on the employee side is individualized, role-specific sharing at 38.8%.

“Most organizations I talk to are not underpaying people on purpose, and plenty of them cannot move payroll much at all right now,” said Dwyer. “That shouldn’t be the end of the conversation. Employees rate fairness on what they can see and what someone can explain to them. If a manager cannot answer why your pay looks the way it does, the employee fills in the blank, and they rarely fill it in generously.”

The Quiet Market Is a Phase, Not a Permanent State

According to BLS JOLTS data, the quits rate fell to 1.9% in May 2026, down from a peak of roughly 2.8% in 2022 and its lowest level outside the initial 2020 pandemic shock. Combined with a hires rate of 3.3% and layoffs and discharges holding at 1.1%, the data points to a genuine low-hire, low-fire equilibrium: not a sudden freeze, but a steady multi-year cooling. The report argues that what organizations do during this window will determine their footing when it ends.

“The mistake is treating a quiet labor market as a safe one,” said Dwyer. “The market is holding its breath. The organizations that use this window to improve trust and pay fairness will be in better positioned when it exhales.”

The full 2026 Trust and Pay Report is available for download. A companion report examining how AI is reshaping employee experience, skill requirements, and workload will follow.

About the Survey

The 2026 Trust and Pay Report is based primarily on Salary.com’s Workplace Program Practices Survey, a paired study fielded in June 2026 via third-party research panel Dynata, with 1,051 employer respondents and 975 employee respondents. Employer and employee respondents are independent samples answering parallel versions of the same questions, not matched pairs at the individual or organization level. All comparisons are between group-level distributions rather than within-person or within-organization pairs.

The relationship between pay fairness perception and trust was tested against respondent-level data. It is statistically significant (chi-square, p<0.0001) with a moderate effect size (Cramer’s V = 0.366). Salary.com reports the finding as an association rather than a causal claim.

The manager training comparison cited above (69.2% and 51.6%) comes from a separate instrument, Salary.com’s annual Pay Practices and Compensation Strategy Survey, which collects responses from HR and compensation professionals only.

Labor market context is drawn from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, news release USDL-26-1123, released June 30, 2026.

About Salary.com

Founded in 1999, Salary.com helps organizations get pay right with a complete approach to compensation management. Built on a proprietary job ontology, Salary.com delivers AI software, data, and services that enable companies to define roles, benchmark jobs, manage pay structures, and make pay decisions built to last. More than 10,000 customers worldwide trust Salary.com, with insights powered by over 30,000 organizations across 140+ countries and spanning more than 1.4 million leveled job titles.

Combining pragmatic innovation in artificial intelligence with deep human expertise, Salary.com helps organizations make precise pay decisions, build trust with employees, and compete in a changing world. For more information, visit www.salary.com.

Media Contact: pr@salary.com