The "Great Resignation" was real. Between April and December 2021, US workers quit their jobs at a monthly rate between 2.7% and 3.0% of the total employed workforce — levels not seen since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking voluntary separations. The stories were everywhere: restaurant workers, retail staff, mid-level office professionals deciding that pandemic-era reflection had clarified what they didn’t want from work. Resignations from roles paying under $60,000 were running at roughly 4x their pre-pandemic rate.
For those of us who place senior US professionals, the Great Resignation produced a different pattern entirely. Senior executive and VP-level voluntary departure rates in 2021 were elevated — but only modestly, and almost entirely for reasons unrelated to the broad themes dominating the media coverage of the period. Understanding why is worth doing, because it reveals something real about how senior US labor markets work that the Great Resignation coverage mostly missed.
What senior professionals actually did
Our data from 2021 shows voluntary departure rates in the senior professional cohort (VP and above, Director in scope-expanded roles) at approximately 0.8% per month — elevated versus the 0.5% to 0.6% typical of pre-pandemic senior professional markets, but dramatically below the 2.7% to 3.0% rate dominating the national headlines.
Three factors account for most of the gap between the senior market and the broader US quit rate.
First, equity and deferred compensation create specific retention mechanics. A VP-level professional at a public technology company in 2021 was typically mid-vesting on an equity grant whose value had roughly doubled since the 2020 lows. Leaving meant forfeiting unvested equity that, in many cases, was worth more than a year’s base salary. The "wealth effect" of appreciated equity was a specific restraint on senior voluntary departures that didn’t apply to hourly workers or salaried employees without equity packages.
Second, senior professional job searches take much longer than entry or mid-level searches. The median time-to-offer for a senior US professional search in 2021 (VP and above) was 14 to 18 weeks. For a junior or mid-level professional, it was 4 to 6 weeks. The higher switching cost for senior candidates — in time, disruption, and the concentration of reference risk — is a structural dampener on voluntary attrition at senior levels regardless of labor market conditions.
Third, the "what do I actually want from work" reflection that drove broad workforce quit rates didn’t produce the same resignation impulse at senior levels. Senior professionals who had a 2021 reflection about purpose and meaning were much more likely to negotiate adjustments within their current roles (remote flexibility, scope changes, management structure changes) than to quit outright. The leverage to negotiate these adjustments was higher, the cost of leaving without a plan was higher, and the range of non-resignation options was wider.
The compensation protection effect
The other big structural difference between the broad Great Resignation and the senior professional market: companies moved much more quickly to address senior retention through compensation than they did for junior and mid-level staff. In 2021, we saw unprecedented proactive comp adjustments at VP and C-suite levels — off-cycle raises, equity refreshes, retention bonuses — that were specifically designed to forestall the departures that companies feared from their most senior people.
The irony is that these proactive moves were, in many cases, more generous than what the same employees would have gotten if they’d put an outside offer on the table. A VP who got a 15% salary increase and a $400,000 equity refresh in Q3 2021 without going anywhere had effectively captured the Great Resignation upside without taking any of its risks. This pattern — which we saw repeatedly across our network in 2021 — was a rational employer response to the broad quit rate. It also somewhat distorted the senior market by creating a significant population of highly-retained, well-compensated senior professionals who felt no particular urgency to move.
The tenure and equity factor
Average tenure at VP-and-above levels in major US companies was approximately 4.2 years in 2021. This is relevant to the Great Resignation story because it means a large fraction of the senior professional population in 2021 was within 1 to 2 years of a major equity cliff or vesting milestone. Forfeiting that cliff by resigning — even into a strong external offer that included a sign-on intended to compensate — produced a financial model that didn’t work for many senior professionals who ran the math.
By contrast, the broad workforce Great Resignation was dominated by workers in roles with no significant deferred compensation. Quitting a $45,000 per year service job requires no equity forfeiture calculation. The structural difference between equity-encumbered senior professionals and non-equity workers explains more of the quit-rate gap than any attitudinal or motivational argument about how senior and junior professionals relate to work.
What changed regardless
Three things did change in the senior US professional market in 2021, even if "the Great Resignation" as a mass phenomenon didn’t. First, the geographic flexibility norm shifted. Remote-viable senior roles became dramatically more acceptable to both candidates and companies during 2021, laying the groundwork for the geographic dispersion of senior professional labor — toward Texas, Florida, and other lower-cost markets — that accelerated through 2022 and 2023.
Second, the negotiating leverage of senior professionals in 2021 was genuinely higher than pre-pandemic. Competition for senior talent intensified across sectors as companies burned down backlogs and expanded headcount. Candidates who chose to negotiate — either for stay-in-place comp improvements or for better external offers — generally got more than they would have in 2019.
Third, the conversation about work structure at the senior level changed permanently. The "you must be physically present in the office" norm that had held at most major US companies was replaced by a more negotiated norm that gave senior professionals significantly more influence over their working arrangements. This isn’t resignation, but it is a material change in the employment relationship. For our current compensation data, the 2021 dynamics are the baseline from which subsequent trends diverged.
What did change for senior professionals
Three things genuinely changed at the senior level during the Great Resignation period, even if the mass-quit phenomenon didn’t fully materialize. These changes have had lasting effects on the structure of senior US professional labor markets.
The geographic assumption was permanently revised. Before 2020, most major US companies operated on the assumption that their senior leadership needed to be physically colocated in the company’s headquarters market. The COVID period proved, at most companies, that senior leadership could operate effectively with a combination of in-person and remote work. For senior professionals, this revision permanently expanded the geographic option set. A CFO or VP of Engineering could now meaningfully consider roles in Austin, Miami, or Denver that would have required relocation regardless of family situation. The geographic option expansion was real and durable, even as return-to-office mandates began walking back some of the flexibility by 2023 and 2024.
The negotiating leverage balance shifted. In the 2021 and early 2022 labor market, senior professionals in competitive functions (engineering leadership, finance leadership, medical affairs, revenue leadership) experienced genuine multi-offer competition for the first time in a decade. This reset the benchmark for what "normal" negotiating terms looked like. Companies that had been offering below-market packages for senior roles found themselves losing candidates they expected to close. The market correction was partly absorbed into higher offer levels and partly into more flexible structures (equity, remote flexibility, retention bonuses). The leverage has since partially reversed toward employers in most sectors, but the 2021-2022 baseline has set a higher floor for what well-positioned senior candidates expect in negotiation.
The expectations for scope and autonomy increased. Senior professionals who demonstrated their ability to operate with full autonomy during the COVID remote period, and who were then asked to return to earlier levels of management oversight and process, experienced a form of scope regression that was deeply unsatisfying even when it didn’t directly trigger a departure. The accumulated frustration of scope regression was a meaningful driver of 2022 and 2023 departures, particularly in technology, that didn’t show up as Great Resignation numbers but did show up as elevated voluntary attrition among the cohort of senior professionals who had been given expanded authority in 2020 and 2021.
Lessons for 2026
The Great Resignation is now a historical event, but its lasting legacy is structural. Senior US professionals evaluating roles in 2026 are operating in a market that was permanently reshaped by: the geographic diversification that accelerated in 2020-2021 and continues to mature; the compensation floor reset that happened in 2021-2022 at senior levels; and the expectation of substantial working flexibility that, even with return-to-office mandates, has produced hybrid arrangements at most major US companies that would not have existed before 2020.
For current compensation context reflecting all of these dynamics, see our 2026 Executive Compensation Report. For the specific geographic dynamics that emerged from this period, our pieces on Texas and Miami cover the most consequential developments.