The received wisdom is that you stay two years before moving, and like most received wisdom it is roughly right for reasons nobody explains. Two years is the point at which a professional services firm has recovered its training investment and you have accumulated enough client-facing work to be legible to an external recruiter. Leaving at eighteen months costs you more than it costs the firm.

The counter-pressure is that the second and third years are when compensation growth is steepest internally. A typical progression sees a graduate move from roughly $70,000 to $95,000 across that window, and an external move at the same moment often delivers a smaller jump than staying, because the market prices you on your title rather than your trajectory.

Where the calculation changes is at the senior consultant or senior associate mark. That is the first level where the external market values the badge independently, and it is also where the internal path narrows considerably — the ratio of managers to seniors at most firms sits somewhere near one to four. Waiting for a promotion that a quarter of your cohort will get is a defensible bet, and it is a bet.

The signal worth watching is not your own rating but the flow of people one level above you. When three managers leave a practice inside six months, the work they were doing lands on the seniors, and the promotion cycle usually follows within a year. When nobody above you moves for two years, the ceiling is real regardless of what the development conversation says.

None of this argues for staying or going. It argues for knowing which of the two clocks you are actually running against, because the people who leave badly tend to be the ones who never checked.