My company is being acquired, pay?

I haven’t had a pay increase for 1.5 years, does this mean I am likely to get one ?

No, it doesn't. In many companies, the benefits packages are standardized. They don't want to deal with the administrative effort of keeping track of individual benefit agreements. So when they acquire employees through a company acquisitions, they will standardize their benefits too.

But the same does not apply to salaries, as those are usually individual agreements. You now have a new employer who has no idea how good you are. They have no way to tell if you are being under- or overpaid. So they will likely leave all the salaries as they are until they made some experience with you and have good reasons to adjust them.

If you have good evidence and arguments why you deserve more money now, then you could of course always start a negotiation from your side. Some tips for engaging in this negotiation can be found on this question on workplace stack exchange. But when you don't ask for a raise, then it's unlikely you are going to get one.

You know the old saying "Good things come to those who wait"? In the workplace, that's a lie. Good things come to those who ask for them, and are not too willing to accept a "No" for an answer.

When a small company gets acquired,

very unfortunately,

1. It's totally common that employees get utterly, totally, completely ripped-off.

It is true that

2. In some cases, everything works out great. You keep your job, and get better benefits and so on.

Very unfortunately, (1) is much more common.

Some points,

• You mention that your boss "told you" you will keep your job. Unfortunately words mean, utterly, nothing. Nothing.

• You mention that you have not had a raise for an incredibly long time. Very unfortunately the new company does not care about that at all. At the new company (if you even have a job) if you tell someone there "Oh, I did not get a raise for a long time at the old company" unfortunately they will just look past you to the wall behind, it means absolutely nothing to them.

• The entire point, the whole raison d'etre of combining two companies is that ............ you can slash costs, ie, fire people. If you have two logo designers, you now only need one, if you have two PHP Wizards you now only need one, etc.

Again, sometimes when there's an acquisition like this, everything works out great for employees, but, typically not.

The best and really only way to get a raise is to aggressively seek for, and ideally get, a new job. Best of luck.

Large companies often have fairly rigidly defined pay structures. They look at what each employee does, assign them a pay grade, then pay them something between the minimum and maximum of that pay grade.

The way you'd get a significant pay rise is to be promoted to the next grade up.

That doesn't mean you can't ask for a pay rise, but you're unlikely to get anything above the maximum they have set for your grade.