The standard pause at the end of a dive: around 5 metres, typically 3 to 5 minutes — even when you never came close to your no-deco limit.
A safety stop is voluntary and yet standard — do not confuse it with a decompression stop, which becomes mandatory the moment you exceed your no-deco limit. The reason it sits at five metres is physics: the biggest relative pressure change of the whole dive is not at depth, it is in the last ten metres. From ten metres to the surface the pressure halves and gas volume doubles. Those minutes at five metres give your tissue time to breathe off surplus nitrogen before that jump arrives. The most common mistake is not a skipped stop but a wobbly one: bobbing between three and seven metres because your buoyancy is not dialled turns it into decoration. Hold the depth with your breathing, not with the inflator. And remember that off-gassing continues at the surface — no flying and no mountain drives for twelve to twenty-four hours after diving.