Did you know that in modern day Nigeria, you can spend almost eight years building a career, only to find that your pay is barely higher than what a recent hire would get? Career professionals call this salary compression. This is the pay gap between experienced and less-experienced workers that has recently started shrinking until it no longer reflects the difference in what they contribute. Idowu Oshunbiyi, a Nigerian career professional, in a recent LinkedIn post, asked what happens when more qualified people compete for limited opportunities. One possible consequence, he suggested, is that the link between experience, responsibility and pay begins to weaken. That is, however, a proposition to be tested, not a settled finding. Still, it names a frustration many workers will recognise.
To delve in further, human resources glossaries describe pay compression as a situation shaped by market-driven pay rates, internal fairness and negotiation. In its sharpest form, called salary inversion, less experienced employees end up earning more than their seasoned colleagues. It usually appears when pay for new hires moves faster than pay for people already on the payroll. In Nigeria, several pressures could feed this. Inflation may outrun annual adjustments. Employers may fix a recruitment budget for a role regardless of the candidate’s history. Pay may be set by what the previous person earned rather than by market data. Oshunbiyi’s own list goes further: an oversupply of candidates, benefits used in place of base salary, pressure from the informal economy, and workers accepting less because having a job has itself become valuable. Although no single cause explains every case as a bank, a start-up and a school will each set pay differently, and a skills shortage in one field can push offers up while another stagnates.
In his post, Idowu Oshunbiyi cites CareerBuddy’s State of Work 2026, which he says is based on responses from 4,750 workers and 250 HR or C-suite employers. As he reports it, 44.9% of workers received a raise but said inflation effectively consumed it, 36.6% saw no change, 13.6% secured a real rise above 30%, and 4.9% had their pay cut. He reads this as more than eight in ten workers being stagnant or falling behind; the three relevant figures do add up to 86.4%. He also cites a September 2026 dataset from Aremu covering 10,400 active jobseekers, with a median salary expectation of ₦200,000 a month.
Regardless of these numbers, Oshunbiyi himself cautions that low pay does not necessarily mean professionals have become less valuable; but it may reflect the balance of power between labour supply and employer demand. BusinessDay reported in 2023 that wage increases were not keeping pace with prices, and Punch, via GPA put formal-sector pay growth from 2019 to 2022 at 35.54% nominal but 19.83% real.
While it is tempting to conclude that employers are simply exploiting a weak market, in some cases that may be true, it does not prove that experienced staff are underpaid. It may also mean entry-level pay has risen with living costs while raises for existing staff have lagged, which is a different problem from newcomers being overpaid. There is also an uncomfortable counter-argument. Oshunbiyi himself points to the idea that experience matters less unless it cannot produce measurable capability. This means ten years in a role can mean ten years of growth, or one year repeated ten times.
So, salary compression may be a real structural shift, a symptom of inflation, or a mixture of both. At present, the public record cannot tell us which, but the voices of those affected could make the picture clearer. Tell us, has your pay kept pace with your experience, and if not, who should be accountable for fixing it: the employer, the market or the worker?