Where the numbers sit now.
Through 2024 and into early 2025 the counter offer rate on senior renewables roles ran above fifty percent. In 2026 it has settled around thirty percent, and the acceptance rate within that thirty percent has fallen further than the offer rate itself.
The reason candidates give us, consistently, is culture and workload rather than compensation. A counter offer that is purely financial, with no change to remit, team or workload, now fails more often than it succeeds. Our own tracking through the second half of 2026 puts financial only counter offer acceptance at under one in four, and where it is accepted, roughly half of those people are back in the market within nine months.
That second number is the important one. A financial counter offer does not retain a person. It defers their departure by two to three quarters and increases the price of the eventual replacement.
If you are the employer being resigned on.
Three honest options, and the order matters.
One. Do not counter, and run a good exit. Unfashionable advice and frequently the right one. If the person has decided, a counter offer buys you a disengaged employee at a higher cost and a worse replacement timeline than if you started the search today. Run a clean handover, stay on good terms, and keep the relationship. We have placed several people back with a previous employer two years later, and that only happens where the exit was handled well.
Two. Counter on the work, not the money. If you genuinely want to keep them, the counter has to change something real. A different project, a wider remit, a team, removal of the thing they are actually leaving. This works. It is also harder than approving a salary increase, which is why most organisations reach for the money instead.
Three. If you must counter financially, fix the underlying inequity. If you need to pay fifteen percent more to retain someone, they were underpaid, and so are the three people beside them who have not resigned yet. A resignation driven increase without a market review is how you generate the next three resignations.
If you are the employer at risk of losing the offer.
You can do a great deal to make a counter offer fail, and almost all of it happens before the resignation.
- Sell the work, continuously, through the whole process. The candidate needs to be able to articulate, unprompted, why this role is better. If the only thing they can articulate is the package, the counter offer wins.
- Get them to the team and the site. A candidate who has met the people and stood on the project is far harder to counter than one who has only met a panel.
- Name the counter offer before it happens. Ask directly what their employer is likely to do and what they will say. A candidate who has rehearsed the conversation handles it. One who has not gets caught by it.
- Keep the gap short. Every day between acceptance and resignation is a day for doubt. Every day between resignation and start date is a day for a counter offer to be improved.
- Stay present through notice. Onboarding should start the day they accept, not the day they arrive. Silence during a notice period is where offers die.
If you are the candidate.
Two things worth knowing, said plainly.
First, the statistics are not in favour of accepting a counter offer. Around half the people who accept one are looking again inside a year, because the reason they wanted to leave was rarely the money and the money is the only thing that changed.
Second, if a resignation is what it took to get your employer to pay you properly, you have learned something about how that organisation makes decisions, and it will apply to your next conversation as well.
None of that means never accept one. If the counter changes the actual job, and the reason you were leaving was the job, it can be the right decision. If it changes only the number, be honest with yourself about whether the number was ever the problem.