In last year’s cycle, 34% of respondents to Blind’s India survey reported a raise of 5% or less. This year the figure is 59%. The numbers suggest the appraisal has become less about how an employee performed and more about what the employer can afford.

October 29, 2026: The anonymous professional community app Blind surveyed 2,178 India-based professionals between October 15 and 26 about their latest salary hike. The headline figures are stark: 30% got no hike and 5% took a pay cut, so 35% had nothing or less than nothing. Including the 24% who got 1–5%, 59% received 5% or less.

How the raises were distributed

Hike this cycle	Share of respondents
Pay cut	5%
No hike	30%
1–5%	24%
6–10%	19%
11–15%	10%
Above 15%	12%

Put another way, only about one in five (22%) got more than 10%.

The mood: not a close call

Overall, 63% were dissatisfied, including 47% who were “very dissatisfied”. Only 19% were satisfied, and 19% were neutral. Satisfaction tracks the raise closely. Among those who got no hike or a pay cut, 83% were dissatisfied, compared with 33% among those who received more than 5%. Even a third of the people with decent raises were unhappy, which hints that the discontent is about more than the number.

“It wasn’t me”

Asked for the biggest factor behind their hike, only 22% pointed to their individual performance rating. Some 41% blamed the company’s financial performance or cost-cutting, 18% named AI and automation changing team priorities, 13% cited their manager’s influence and 6% a promotion or role change. Respondents read the outcome as a top-down decision, not a verdict on them.

Two employers, two extremes

Zoho. Founder Sridhar Vembu froze annual hikes this year, citing rising AI and server costs, and said the company would work to avoid mass layoffs, as reported by Indian outlets such as People Matters. Among Zoho respondents in Blind’s survey, 95% received no raise or a pay cut, and 90% were dissatisfied. Last year, 84% of Zoho respondents reported a hike above 10%. A Zoho employee wrote on Blind that colleagues were “talking about unionisation after no hike”.

Microsoft. 91% of Microsoft respondents got 5% or less, up from 45% last year, and only 5% got more than 10%, down from 27%. A total of 86% were dissatisfied, the second-highest share after Zoho. This coincides with reports that Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees across India, the US, Canada and the UK as it spends heavily on AI.

The spread between firms

Beyond those two, the share receiving no hike or a pay cut was highest at Oracle (60%), Salesforce (42%), Cisco (40%) and Amazon (36%). At the other end, 67% of Nutanix respondents got raises above 10%. Amazon is the most polarised case: 36% got nothing or a cut, while 33% got more than 15%. Averages hide that gap, and so does the phrase “tech pay”.

The anxiety behind the pay slip

The search data point the same way. Over the past year, 21% of Blind users in India searched for layoffs or severance, up from 16% the year before. The share searching for buyouts and voluntary exit programmes rose 60%, while the share searching for hikes, raises or pay freezes fell 7%. Searches are shifting from raises towards exits, though search data cannot show why.

How far to trust it

This is a self-selected survey of users of an anonymous app, and the material supplied does not say how respondents’ employment was verified. It is not a representative sample of India’s tech workforce, and a headline of “1 in 3 Indian tech workers” is looser than the data. Company-level figures cover only firms with at least 30 responses on a question, so small shifts could swing a result. The year-on-year comparison uses a different group of 2,417 respondents from 2025, so it shows a change in who answered as well as in what happened. The dissatisfaction shares in the release add to 62% from the breakdown but are reported as 63%, likely due to rounding. Blind’s findings on Zoho and Microsoft are consistent with public reporting about a Zoho freeze and Microsoft buyouts, but I have not verified the survey figures themselves.

For employers, the lesson may be in the gap between what happened and who people think decided it: when only one in five employees ties a raise to their own performance, a pay cycle that was meant to motivate has stopped communicating anything.