Should you accept a counter offer: how to decide
Someone hands in their notice. Twenty minutes later, there's a number attached to a reason to stay. That's a counter offer — and if you're in finance right now, you're more likely to get one than at almost any point in the last few years.
Why they're everywhere right now
Experienced finance and payroll professionals aren't easy to replace quickly. Employers would rather pay more to keep someone than start again from zero. CIPD's Labour Market Outlook found 40% of UK employers made a counter offer to a resigning employee — and of those, 40% offered more than the competing role, not just a match.
December adds its own push. A third of UK workers say they feel more stressed in December than any other month, and close to half report work-related stress across the run-up to Christmas. That's when the quiet job-hunting tends to start — and when counter offers start landing to stop it.
What the data says happens next
Here's the part most people hear about after they've already said yes. A study found 53% of people who got a counter offer took it. Of those, 34% had left anyway within six months. 74% within a year. Under 35? Nearly half were gone within six months.
A counter offer doesn't fix whatever made you look in the first place. It buys the other side time — and for a lot of people, that's all it turns out to be.
What's actually changed, and what hasn't
A bigger number on the payslip changes one thing. It doesn't make up for the manager who never gives you a straight answer, the promotion that's been "coming soon" for two years, or the workload that's crept up since January. If money really was the whole issue, a genuine counter offer can be enough — worth checking it against [what the West Midlands is actually paying](/company/blog/credit-controller-salaries-2026) first, not just what your employer calls generous. If it wasn't the whole issue, the number won't touch the rest of it.
How to actually decide
The useful question isn't the number. It's whether the money was actually the whole problem. If it was, a counter offer solves it, cleanly. If it wasn't, the same conversation tends to happen again in six months — with less goodwill on both sides than it had the first time.
Worth weighing, too, whether the new role actually clears up the real reason you started looking. When it does, that's usually worth more than a raise — the numbers above suggest that bet pays off roughly twice as often as staying does.
And if the honest answer is "I don't actually want to leave, I just want to be paid properly," that's a reasonable thing to raise directly with a manager. It doesn't need a resignation letter to make the point.
Either way, [the market's genuinely open right now](/company/blog/good-time-to-move-finance-2026) across West Midlands finance — so this is a decision that's actually yours to make, not one forced by a thin market on one side or a panicked counter offer on the other.