Feels like there's also a practice for a couple of years where companies raise prices in line with inflation, but keep annual employee COLA raises pinned to their typical 2-3% historical rate.
It's pretty common from my experience, for Fortune 500 type companies to do an annual raise of 2-3% for employees that is not tied to a promotion. They may not call it a "COLA" raise, but that's what it is. Though, yes, I'm sure some have frozen that in recent years.
Note that they talk about it being a "merit raise", but that's sort of double talk. It's the budget for raises that aren't tied to a promotion. So the pool amount is 3.5%-ish, and you get some leeway to personalize it a bit..some people get 0%, some 2%, some 5%, etc. But it's just a COLA in disguise where most people get just under the pool percentage. Meaning most people get 2.5-3% or so.
Mercer gets their data from roughly 500 companies of varying sizes.
And, yes, I'm sure there are some places that don't give any sort of annual COLA type raises at all.
When a company says "cost of living" they mean their own, not their employees. So-called COLA adjustments are for Cost of Hiring, or Cost of Employee Retention.
The distinction is that it is calculated based on minimizing unwanted attrition due to wage competition elsewhere, and has nothing to do with how much rent or milk prices may have increased.
Everywhere I worked in my life (perm employment) I was getting at least the inflation. If performance (personal + corp) was well, I was getting an extra 3%-5% and bonus. (in the EU)
