Gallup's current Employee Retention & Attraction indicator says 52% of US employees are watching for or actively seeking a new job. Watching is not the same as applying, so this is an intent-to-leave signal rather than a turnover rate.
The latest BLS Employee Tenure release reports a median of 3.9 years in January 2024. Private-sector median tenure was 3.5 years, compared with 6.2 years in the public sector.
Choose a period and a starting cohort. Divide the number of people from that starting cohort who are still employed at the end by the number employed at the start, then multiply by 100. Exclude people hired during the period from the numerator.
Gallup grouped 2024 US exit reasons into engagement and culture at 37% and wellbeing and work-life balance at 31%. Pay and benefits was the most common single reason, but it accounted for 16%.
Gallup and Workhuman tracked nearly 3,500 employees from 2022 to 2024. Employees who were well recognized in 2022 were 45% less likely to have changed organizations two years later. This is strong longitudinal evidence, not a guarantee for every employer.
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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.
Citation summary: Gallup's current US indicator says 52% of employees
are watching for or actively seeking a new job. BLS reports 3.9 years as
the median US employee tenure in January 2024. Gallup grouped 68% of 2024 US
exit reasons under engagement and culture or wellbeing and work-life
balance.
12 employee retention statistics
52% of US employees are watching for or actively seeking a new job, according to Gallup's current retention indicator.
37% of 2024 US exit reasons fell under engagement and culture.
31% of exit reasons fell under wellbeing and work-life balance.
Together, those two themes represented 68% of the reasons employees left.
Pay and benefits was the largest single reason at 16%, but it was far smaller than the two broader themes combined.
20% of employees worldwide were engaged in 2025, the lowest level since 2020.
Manager engagement fell to 22% globally in 2025, down from 27% a year earlier.
79% of managers were engaged at Gallup's best-practice organizations in 2025.
Median US employee tenure was 3.9 years in January 2024, the lowest since January 2002.
22% of US wage and salary workers had one year or less of tenure with their employer.
Food preparation and serving workers had 2.0 years of median tenure, one of the lowest occupation figures in the BLS release.
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.
Measure
What it answers
What it does not prove
Retention rate
What share of a starting cohort stayed?
Why they stayed
Turnover rate
How many departures occurred relative to headcount?
That every departure was voluntary
Tenure
How long current workers have been with one employer
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:
Gallup exit-reason theme
Share of reasons
Practical reading
Engagement and culture
37%
Management, respect, recognition, development, and workplace experience matter together
Wellbeing and work-life balance
31%
Burnout, personal wellbeing, workload, and life fit create another large block
Pay and benefits
16% as the largest single reason
Compensation matters, but it does not explain most exits on its own
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 group
Median tenure
All wage and salary workers
3.9 years
Private-sector workers
3.5 years
Public-sector workers
6.2 years
Workers ages 25 to 34
2.7 years
Workers ages 55 to 64
9.6 years
Management occupations
5.7 years
Service occupations
2.7 years
Food preparation and serving
2.0 years
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
Retention has more than one signal
Compare intent to leave, exit reasons, tenure, and one longitudinal retention study.
52%
Watching or actively seeking
20%
Globally engaged in 2025
3.9
Median US tenure, years
22%
With one year or less tenure
These metrics describe different things: job-search intent, engagement, current-worker tenure, and short tenure. They should not be combined into one retention rate.
Sources: Gallup; Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2026; BLS Employee Tenure 2024; Gallup and Workhuman
For example, if 43 of your 50 starting employees remain, retention is 43 ÷ 50 × 100 = 86.00%. The other 7 people have left. Use the same start and end dates for both counts and exclude new hires. Qualtrics explains the remaining-to-original employee calculation.
Calculator checked October 14, 2026. The benchmarks elsewhere on this page retain the source dates listed below.
Employee Retention Rate Calculator
Use the same starting cohort for both inputs. Do not include people hired during the period.
Retention rate:
86.00
%
Starting cohort: 50 people (the denominator). Still employed at the end: 43 people. Starting-cohort departures: 7 people. Exclude new hires during the period. Compare the same period across teams, locations, and managers.
A company-wide annual percentage is a lagging indicator. Track these together:
Starting-cohort retention: monthly, quarterly, and annual.
Voluntary and involuntary departures: separate employee choice from layoffs and dismissals.
Tenure at departure: first 30 days, 31 to 90 days, first year, and longer-tenured exits.
Role, location, and manager: a company average can hide one team with a serious problem.
Exit reasons: use consistent categories and allow more than one contributing factor.
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
Fact used on this page
Original source
Scope and date
52% watching for or actively seeking a job; 2024 exit-reason themes
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.
