Being counter-offered after you resign feels flattering, and it's genuinely common: roughly half of people who resign receive one. The harder question isn't whether to feel good about it. It's whether accepting actually solves what made you start looking for a new role in the first place, or just delays the same conversation.
A counter-offer answers one question, not the real one
A pay rise addresses salary. It rarely addresses the actual reason someone started looking, which is more often about growth, workload, management, or flexibility than the number on a payslip. If salary genuinely wasn't your main reason for looking, a counter-offer is solving a problem you didn't actually have.
What tends to happen afterwards
It's a well-documented pattern across recruitment: a large share of people who accept a counter-offer are back on the market again within a matter of months, because the underlying issue resurfaces once the immediate crisis of a resignation has passed. Worth taking seriously as a genuine pattern, not as a scare tactic.
The relationship has already shifted
Once you've resigned, even if you stay, the firm now knows you were prepared to leave. That doesn't have to be dramatic, but it can quietly affect how you're viewed for the next promotion or opportunity internally, fairly or not, simply because the question of your loyalty has now been raised once already.
Questions worth asking yourself before accepting
- If I hadn't resigned, would this offer or change have happened anyway?
- Does this actually fix the reason I started looking, or just the symptom of it?
- Am I staying for the role, or to avoid an uncomfortable conversation?
- Would I still be genuinely excited about this firm in twelve months if nothing else changed?
If you do decide to stay
If, honestly, the counter-offer resolves the real issue, a genuine restructure, a real new opportunity, not just a number, get any change agreed in writing, and revisit it again in three to six months to check it actually stuck. The test isn't how the offer feels the day you receive it; it's whether the original reason you were looking has genuinely gone away.
About Assiduous Staffing
Assiduous Staffing is a Sydney-based legal support recruitment agency, founded by Claire Booth, placing exceptional legal support and business operations professionals into law firms and in-house legal teams across Australia. From Legal Secretaries and Executive Assistants through to Practice Managers and Legal Operations specialists, we recruit exclusively within legal support, which means genuine depth in a market most agencies only cover in passing.