Employee Retention Statistics: 52% Are Open to New Jobs

Employee retention is not one number. It includes who stays, who is open to leaving, how long people remain, and why departures happen.

This reference brings those measures together without pretending they are interchangeable. It uses the current Gallup retention indicator, Gallup's 2026 global workplace report, the latest BLS employee-tenure release, and Gallup-Workhuman longitudinal research.

12 employee retention statistics

1. 52% of US employees are watching for or actively seeking a new job, according to Gallup's current retention indicator.
2. 37% of 2024 US exit reasons fell under engagement and culture.
3. 31% of exit reasons fell under wellbeing and work-life balance.
4. Together, those two themes represented 68% of the reasons employees left.
5. Pay and benefits was the largest single reason at 16%, but it was far smaller than the two broader themes combined.
6. 20% of employees worldwide were engaged in 2025, the lowest level since 2020.
7. Manager engagement fell to 22% globally in 2025, down from 27% a year earlier.
8. 79% of managers were engaged at Gallup's best-practice organizations in 2025.
9. Median US employee tenure was 3.9 years in January 2024, the lowest since January 2002.
10. 22% of US wage and salary workers had one year or less of tenure with their employer.
11. Food preparation and serving workers had 2.0 years of median tenure, one of the lowest occupation figures in the BLS release.
12. Well-recognized employees were 45% less likely to have changed organizations after two years in Gallup-Workhuman's longitudinal study.

What the numbers actually measure

Retention pages often mix four different measures and call all of them “turnover.” That creates bad comparisons.

For a definition-matched industry comparison, use the BLS turnover rates by industry. For financial planning, use the employee turnover cost guide. Neither should be treated as a substitute for your own cohort retention rate.

Why employees leave

Gallup asked US employees for the primary reason they left their previous job in 2024. “Pay/Benefits” was the most common single reason at 16%, but the broader pattern was more useful:

Engagement and culture plus wellbeing and work-life balance made up 68% of the reasons employees left. That is four times the share attributed to pay and benefits as the primary reason.

This does not mean pay is unimportant. It means an exit form with one vague “better opportunity” checkbox is too blunt. Separate compensation, manager, workload, schedule, recognition, career path, and personal reasons if you want data you can act on.

Employee tenure benchmarks

The latest BLS Employee Tenure release covers January 2024. Tenure is not retention rate, but it shows how long current employees have stayed with the same employer.

BLS also found that 22% of workers had one year or less of tenure. That group includes new hires, people who found work after job loss, and voluntary job changers, so it should not be labeled an early-attrition rate.

Recognition has unusually strong retention evidence

Gallup and Workhuman followed nearly 3,500 employees from 2022 to 2024 instead of asking only what they intended to do.

Employees who were well recognized in 2022 were 45% less likely to have changed organizations two years later. In the 2024 follow-up, employees receiving recognition that met at least four of Gallup's five quality pillars were 65% less likely to be watching for or actively seeking another job than employees receiving lower-quality recognition.

The study does not prove that a praise program will reduce every employer's turnover by exactly 45%. It does show that specific, authentic, equitable, embedded, and fulfilling recognition is associated with a materially lower risk of leaving.

Calculate your employee retention rate

Use a fixed starting cohort. Do not add new hires to the numerator, or a hiring surge can make a weak retention period look healthy.

Employee retention rate = people from the starting cohort still employed at the end / people employed at the start × 100

A retention dashboard that is actually useful

A company-wide annual percentage is a lagging indicator. Track these together:

1. Starting-cohort retention: monthly, quarterly, and annual.
2. Voluntary and involuntary departures: separate employee choice from layoffs and dismissals.
3. Tenure at departure: first 30 days, 31 to 90 days, first year, and longer-tenured exits.
4. Role, location, and manager: a company average can hide one team with a serious problem.
5. Exit reasons: use consistent categories and allow more than one contributing factor.
6. Schedule friction for shift teams: late publication, ignored availability, repeated changes, and difficult shift swaps.

If the financial effect matters, pair this dashboard with a turnover-cost estimate. If the pattern is concentrated in a high-churn sector, compare it with the industry turnover benchmark before setting a target.

Where scheduling helps, and where it does not

Scheduling software will not fix low pay, a poor manager, unsafe work, or a missing career path. Claiming otherwise turns a useful operational tool into magic dust.

For shift teams, it can remove a narrower set of recurring frustrations:

• Publish schedules to employees' phones
• Collect availability before assigning shifts
• Let employees request swaps with manager approval
• Fill open shifts through employee notifications
• Keep clock-in data, overtime hours, approvals, and timesheet exports together

If schedule instability appears in exit feedback, those are practical problems to fix. Turnozo helps small teams manage that weekly work without pretending it is the whole retention strategy.

Source table

Methodology and limitations

• Current indicator: Gallup's 52% figure is the value displayed on its live US retention indicator on August 19, 2026. Gallup can update that figure after this page is published.
• Report year versus data year: Gallup's 2026 workplace report describes employee data collected in 2025.
• Historical tenure benchmark: BLS tenure data are from January 2024. The release is still useful, but it is not a 2026 employer-retention survey.
• Different denominators: Intent to leave, retention rate, quits, total separations, and tenure cannot be placed in one ranked league table.
• Study interpretation: The Gallup-Workhuman recognition result is longitudinal and stronger than a one-time opinion survey, but it is still not a promise that one intervention will create the same effect everywhere.
• Company calculation: Use a fixed starting cohort and one consistent period when comparing your own teams.

For adjacent evidence, the employee burnout statistics page separates wellbeing from resignation, while the scheduling fairness guide explains how to audit one controllable part of the weekly employee experience.