Read this first. We are a recruitment agency. If you accept the counter-offer, we do not get paid. That is about as direct a conflict of interest as exists in this industry, and you should weight everything below accordingly.
So this piece does not tell you what to do. It gives you the questions worth answering and an honest account of when staying is the right call, because advice that always landed on "leave" would be worth nothing and you would be right to ignore it.
You resigned. Within a day or two there is money on the table that was not there last week, possibly a title, possibly a promise about the thing that was actually bothering you. It is flattering, it is disorienting, and you have about forty-eight hours to think clearly about it.
The question almost everyone asks is "is this enough money?" It is the wrong first question, because it is the one your employer has already decided the answer to. The better one is narrower and harder: is anything that made me start looking actually different now?
Four questions worth answering
1. What is the counter actually worth, against the market rather than against your old salary?
A 12 per cent rise sounds substantial until you find it has moved you from below the band to the bottom of it. That is not a reward, it is a correction, and it is worth knowing which one you are being offered.
Check the counter against the published band for your discipline, level and city. The salary checker takes about ten seconds. If the counter lands in the bottom quarter of the band, you have been brought to market, not past it. If it clears the midpoint, the money is genuinely competitive and you can stop treating that part as the problem.
2. Which of your reasons for looking does it fix?
This is the whole decision, and it takes about two minutes to answer honestly. Write down why you started looking. Not the polished version for the exit conversation, the real list: the manager, the scope that never widened, the work that stopped being interesting, the flexibility you gave up, the feeling that nobody noticed.
Then go through it and mark which ones the counter actually deals with. Not which ones were mentioned warmly in the conversation. Which ones have a specific change attached, with a date.
If the answer is "the money, and nothing else", you are being offered a solution to a problem you may not have had. That is not automatically wrong, but you should know that is what is happening.
3. Why did it take a resignation?
If your employer can approve a rise within two days of your notice, the budget existed before you handed it in. That is not necessarily bad faith. Pay reviews are annual and slow by design, and managers often genuinely cannot move outside them without an escalation. But it is a fair thing to ask, and the answer tells you something about how the next increase will go.
4. What happens to your next review?
The question almost nobody asks in the moment. If your review was due in three months, is this increase on top of it, or has it just been brought forward and relabelled? Ask directly and get the answer in writing. A counter-offer that quietly consumes your next two years of increases is a considerably worse deal than it looks on the day.
The statistic, and what it does and does not prove
You will be told, often by recruiters, that a large share of people who accept a counter-offer leave within a year anyway. That is a real and repeatedly observed pattern, and it is worth understanding rather than just repeating.
The likeliest explanation is straightforward: the counter addressed the resignation rather than the reason for it. The money changed, the manager did not, and six months later the original problem is still there with a pay rise attached. Trust can be a factor too. Some managers do treat a resignation as a signal of disloyalty even while writing the cheque, and being first on a list in a downturn is a real risk that nobody will tell you about at the time.
But notice what the statistic cannot tell you. It is an average over people who mostly accepted counters that fixed only the money. It says very little about someone whose counter genuinely fixed the underlying problem, because those people are not the ones generating the number. Do not let a population statistic make a decision that is entirely about your specific case.
When staying is genuinely the right call
This section exists because a piece from a recruitment agency without it would not be worth reading. There are situations where accepting is clearly the better decision, and they are not rare.
- The counter fixes the actual problem, with specifics. A named scope change, a different reporting line, a defined path to the title, all with dates. Money plus a concrete non-money change is a materially different offer from money alone.
- You were underpaid and nothing else was wrong. If pay was genuinely the only item on your list, the counter puts you above the band midpoint, and you like the work and the people, then the problem is solved. Leaving anyway on principle costs you a job you liked.
- The new role is worse and you had not admitted it. A resignation creates enormous momentum, and momentum is not evidence. If the counter has made you notice that you were leaving a good job for an uncertain one, that is useful information, whatever its source.
- Something outside work has changed. Health, family, a mortgage approval mid-process. Stability has real value and it is legitimate to weigh it heavily. Nobody else has to think it was the right trade.
If you do stay, get everything that is not the salary in writing, with dates. The scope, the title, the reporting line, the flexibility. Those are the parts that most often evaporate once the resignation stops being fresh, precisely because they are harder to deliver than a number in a payroll system. A salary increase appears automatically in the next pay run. A promised scope change requires someone to keep caring about it in March.
If you decide to go
Decline the counter properly. Thank them, be specific that the decision is not about the money, and do not use the counter as leverage to extract more from either side. The engineering market in any Australian city is small enough that you will meet these people again, and a clean exit is worth more over a career than the last few thousand dollars of either offer.
Work your notice properly and hand over well. The version of you that people remember is the one from the last two weeks.
A tool, with the same disclosure attached
We built the Counter-Offer Check to do the second question properly, since it is the one that decides this and the one people skip. You enter the numbers and the reasons you were looking, tick which of those the counter genuinely addresses, and it lays out what has changed against what has not, with the counter placed against the published band.
It gives you no verdict and no score, for the reason at the top of this page. It also cannot be gamed in our favour: you say which reasons are addressed, not us, and if your answers favour staying it says so plainly. It runs entirely in your browser and nothing you type is uploaded, which matters when the thing you are typing is your salary and the fact that you have resigned.
A counter-offer is information, not a plan. It tells you what you were worth to them all along, and how quickly they can move when they want to. What you do with that is a separate decision.
FAQ
Should I accept a counter-offer?
There is no general answer, and you should be sceptical of anyone who gives you one, particularly a recruiter. The useful test is not whether the number is bigger but whether the reasons you started looking are different now. A counter-offer typically fixes the money and leaves everything else exactly as it was. If it genuinely addresses what made you look, and the money is competitive against the market band for your role, staying can be the right call.
Why do most people who accept a counter-offer leave anyway?
The common explanation is that the counter addressed the resignation rather than the reason for it. The money changes and the manager, the scope and the work do not, so the original problem is still there a few months later with a pay rise attached. It is a pattern rather than a law: people who accept a counter that genuinely fixed the underlying problem are not the ones showing up in that statistic.
Is it true the raise was available all along?
If your employer can approve a rise within days of your resignation, that budget existed before you resigned. That is not necessarily bad faith, since pay reviews are annual and slow by design, but it is a fair thing to raise. The more useful question is what happens at your next scheduled review: whether this increase sits on top of it or absorbs it.
What should I get in writing if I stay?
Everything that is not the salary. The scope change, the title, the reporting line, the flexibility, and the date each takes effect. Those are the parts that most often evaporate once the resignation is no longer fresh, precisely because they are harder to deliver than a number in a payroll system. Also confirm whether your next scheduled review is on top of this increase or absorbed by it.