Percentage of Employers Expecting to Offer Signing Bonuses Increases

Nearly 56% of employers expect to offer signing bonuses to their new college hires from the Class of 2026, according to results of NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 survey.

This comes despite employers expecting overall hiring for the Class of 2026 to be flat. It shows that they continue to use signing bonuses to sweeten compensation packages to attract top talent, especially in high-demand fields.

This year’s percentage is up from 52% of employers that expected to offer signing bonuses to their hires from the Class of 2025 last fall. That grew as nearly 60% actually gave their new college hires signing bonuses last year. (See Figure 1.)

Among those employers that anticipate offering signing bonuses this year, 47.2% plan to offer signing bonuses to all graduates they hire, while 52.8% will offer bonuses only to selected candidates.

NACE collected data for its Job Outlook 2026 survey from August 7, 2025, through September 22, 2025. Of the 183 total respondents, 170 were NACE employer members, representing 22.7% of eligible member respondents. The Job Outlook 2026 survey was also distributed to nonmember companies; this group provided an additional 13 responses. Job Outlook 2026 is available on NACEWeb.