Your annual review is a pay moment. Are you unusual if you actually ask?

17% of workers asked for a raise in 2025, in a survey fielded October 17 through 28. The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System published the figure on June 10, 2026, in its Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2025 report. But the annual-review pressure is sharper than the statistic. The separating moment is not wanting more money. It is saying the ask out loud.

That makes a review meeting different from a private spreadsheet. You can know your case, collect praise, and still hesitate when the conversation reaches pay. The Federal Reserve’s 17% benchmark puts that hesitation in context: asking was the less common worker move.

Only 17% crossed the spoken pay line

The Federal Reserve source identifies the measure as Figure 7, titled asking for and receiving a raise. The Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking was fielded from October 17 through October 28, 2025, and the report appeared in 2026.

For review season, the timing is useful. A worker preparing a year-end summary in 2025 is looking at a national benchmark from the same year. The 17% figure is not a company rule, and Figure 7 does not say what any one manager will do. It says the spoken ask was uncommon.

A raise request has to become a sentence

A raise request can be one short sentence, but it carries several judgments at once: the timing, the evidence, the amount you name, and whether your voice stays steady. The Federal Reserve’s 2025 benchmark does not measure tone. It measures the worker who actually asked.

That is the speaking side of the 17% number. You are choosing whether to speak in a high-stakes conversation, not only whether to want more pay. For many workers, the moment feels closer to confidence in public speaking than to filling out a form.

Can nerves help in salary talks?

A separate 2016 study in PLoS ONE tested pressure inside salary negotiations. Researchers randomly assigned 97 male and female participants to receive instructions to appraise their anxiety as beneficial to the negotiation, or to receive no specific appraisal instructions.

The 2016 paper reported different patterns by instruction. Cortisol increases were positively related to negotiation performance for participants told to view anxiety as beneficial. For participants given no appraisal instruction, cortisol increases were negatively related to negotiation performance.

That finding does not promise a raise in 2025, 2026, or any review cycle. It narrows the live issue. Nerves in a salary conversation are not automatically the whole problem. In the 97-participant experiment, the appraisal of anxiety was part of the negotiation result.

A worked example starts before the meeting

Take a worker preparing for a 2025 annual review. The Federal Reserve benchmark says 17% of workers asked for a raise. The 2016 salary-negotiation study says 97 participants were randomly assigned to an anxiety-appraisal instruction or no specific instruction.

The useful first line is plain: “I’d like to discuss my compensation in this review.” The data cannot say whether the answer will be yes. It can say that, in the 2025 worker benchmark, voicing the request puts you outside the larger group that did not ask.

The numbers to keep straight

The evidence here is narrow, which is why the numbers matter. One public source gives the worker benchmark for 2025. The other gives an experimental salary-negotiation result published in 2016 with 97 participants.

The table does not settle your raise. It frames the speaking moment. The common behavior in the 2025 benchmark was not to ask. The 2016 experiment, with 97 participants, tested what happened when people interpreted negotiation anxiety differently.

What this means for you

If you plan to ask for a raise in your review, treat the sentence itself as part of the preparation. Write one plain version before the meeting. Keep it short enough that you can say it without racing or softening the end.

Put the ask early enough that it does not vanish under project updates. If nerves rise, label them as energy for a negotiation rather than proof you should back down. The benchmark is clear: in 2025, the worker who asked was doing the less common thing.