Employee retention statistics are only useful if you can trace each number to the study behind it. This post opens with Matter's own 2026 research and then adds third-party data that we checked against the original publisher. In Matter's 2026 survey of 1,021 U.S. professionals, 1 in 3 employees receive genuine recognition once a month or less, and the rarely-recognized are three times as likely to say only money means anything. On Matter's platform, teams that build recognition around a weekly ritual give about 2.5x more recognition per member than ad hoc teams, and roughly 8 in 10 ritual teams stay active in nearly every month, according to The Recognition Habit, Matter's 2026 Benchmark Report. The third-party picture explains why employee retention stays on every HR agenda: 3.1 million Americans quit their jobs in July 2026, Gallup's 2024 research found that 42% of voluntary turnover was preventable, and replacing an employee can cost anywhere from half to two times their salary. Every statistic below names its source and study year.
Disclosure: Matter publishes this post and builds employee recognition, rewards, and survey software for Slack and Microsoft Teams. Last verified September 2026.
How we sourced these statistics
Three kinds of data appear in this post. First, Matter's platform data: aggregate, de-identified recognition activity across thousands of workspaces over the trailing twelve months, published in the 2026 Benchmark Report. Second, Matter's two 2026 surveys, each drawing on 1,021 employed U.S. professionals recruited through an independent third-party research panel (Cint) between June 30 and July 13, 2026. Third, primary third-party research from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Gallup, SHRM, Work Institute, McKinsey, Pew Research Center, a peer-reviewed study in Nature, and two named vendor surveys with disclosed methodology (Owl Labs and BambooHR). Every third-party number links to its original publisher and states the study year in the text. Nothing is cited from a secondary blog, and figures we could not trace to a primary source were removed, including the pre-2020 turnover-cost estimates that earlier versions of this post relied on. All of Matter's studies live at Matter's research hub.
Employee turnover, quit rate, and tenure statistics for 2026
Employee turnover is the rate at which people leave an organization; retention is the share of your workforce that stays over a given period. The government data below is the baseline every company should measure itself against.
1. 3.1 million U.S. workers quit their jobs in July 2026, a quits rate of 1.9%. Total separations were 5.1 million (3.2%), hires were 5.1 million, and the quits level was unchanged from July 2025 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, July 2026, released September 1, 2026). The quits rate is the cleanest national measure of voluntary turnover, and summed across twelve months a 1.9% monthly rate means more than one in five workers quit in a year.
2. The median U.S. worker has been with their employer for 3.9 years, down from 4.1 years two years earlier. Median tenure is 2.7 years for workers aged 25 to 34 and 9.6 years for workers aged 55 to 64; it is 4.2 years for men and 3.6 years for women (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employee Tenure in January 2024).
3. Only 46% of U.S. employees say it is a good time to find a job, a 10-point drop from the prior three-year average. The same 2025 data found 50% of U.S. employees experienced stress a lot of the previous day (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026, U.S. country data). A cooler job market lowers quits for a while; it does not fix the reasons people were looking.
4. 41% of employees with a strong sense of purpose at work are watching for or actively seeking a new job, compared with 68% of those with low purpose. That 27-point gap comes from Gallup's November 2025 study of 4,475 U.S. working adults with Stand Together (Gallup, 2025).
5. 40% of employees said they were at least somewhat likely to quit in the next three to six months, and 36% of those who had quit did so without a new job in hand. McKinsey's September 2021 survey covered 5,774 working-age people across Australia, Canada, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States (McKinsey, 2021). The labor market has cooled since, but the finding that people will leave a bad situation without a landing spot still shapes how leaders should read exit data.
Cost of employee turnover statistics
Use Matter's employee turnover calculator to put your own numbers against the benchmarks below.
6. The average cost per hire is nearly $4,700, and the total cost to replace an employee can run three to four times the position's salary. SHRM's 2022 benchmarking analysis notes that hiring for a $60,000 role may cost $180,000 or more once soft costs such as lost productivity and manager time are counted; 30% to 40% of the total is hard cost and about 60% is soft cost (SHRM, 2022).
7. Replacing an individual employee costs one-half to two times that employee's annual salary. Gallup's 2019 analysis put the total cost of voluntary turnover to U.S. businesses at $1 trillion a year, and found that 52% of voluntarily exiting employees said their manager or organization could have done something to prevent them from leaving (Gallup, 2019). The replacement-cost range is still the figure Gallup cites, which is why it stays here with its year stated.
8. Business units in the top quartile on engagement have 21% lower turnover in high-turnover organizations and 51% lower turnover in low-turnover organizations. Gallup's Q12 meta-analysis, 11th edition (2024), compared top- and bottom-quartile units across 183,806 business units, 3.35 million employees, 347 organizations, and 90 countries (Gallup Q12 meta-analysis, 2024). Gallup defines high-turnover organizations as those above 40% annualized turnover.
9. Employees who feel burned out very often or always are 2.6 times as likely to leave their current employer. 28% of U.S. employees report that level of burnout (Gallup, 2022).
Why employees leave: exit-reason statistics
10. 42% of employees who voluntarily left their organization say their manager or organization could have done something to prevent it. Gallup's July 2024 study surveyed a random sample of 717 U.S. employees who had voluntarily left an employer within the past year (Gallup, 2024).
11. 45% of voluntary leavers say neither a manager nor another leader proactively discussed their job satisfaction, performance, or future with them in the three months before they left. 44% of those who discussed their intention to leave never raised it with their direct manager, and 77% either left within three months of starting to search or never actively searched at all (Gallup, 2024). The window for a stay conversation is short.
12. 70% of preventable leavers point to how they were managed day to day. The specific actions that would have kept them: more positive personal interactions with their manager (21%), addressing frustrating organizational issues (13%), creating opportunities for career advancement (11%), and improving staffing or workload concerns (9%) (Gallup, 2024).
13. 75% of employee departures in 2025 were preventable. Work Institute's 2025 Retention Report is based on more than 120,000 exit interviews, the largest exit-interview dataset cited in this post (Work Institute, 2025).
14. 63% of workers who quit a job in 2021 cited low pay, 63% cited no opportunities for advancement, and 57% said they felt disrespected at work. 45% cited a lack of flexibility to choose when they put in their hours and 43% cited poor benefits; among those who moved on, 56% said they were earning more and 50% had more flexibility (Pew Research Center, 2022, 965 adults who quit a job in 2021, surveyed February 7 to 13, 2022).
15. 54% of employees who quit said they did not feel valued by their organization, 52% did not feel valued by their manager, and 51% did not feel a sense of belonging. Employers in the same McKinsey 2021 study assumed compensation was the main driver (McKinsey, 2021). Feeling valued is the thread that runs through every exit study above, and it is where recognition enters the retention conversation.
16. 70% of new hires decide whether a job is the right fit within the first month, including 29% who know within the first week. 44% of employees say they had regrets or second thoughts about the job within the first week, which is why BambooHR concludes that companies have about 44 days to influence a new hire's long-term retention (BambooHR, 2023, survey of 1,565 adults, April 2023).
Employee recognition and retention statistics
Recognition is the retention lever a team controls most directly, and it is where Matter's own research is deepest. The survey figures below come from The State of Employee Recognition and Rewards 2026, Matter's survey of 1,021 U.S. professionals.
17. Well-recognized employees were 45% less likely to have turned over two years later. Employees receiving high-quality recognition were also 65% less likely to be actively looking or watching for another job, at a time when 51% of all U.S. employees were, and only 22% of employees say they get the right amount of recognition for the work they do (Gallup, September 2024, longitudinal study of nearly 3,500 employees from 2022 to 2024).
18. 1 in 3 employees receive genuine recognition once a month or less. 45% of professionals are recognized at least weekly, but 33% receive genuine recognition about once a month or less, and 21% say rarely or never (Matter, 2026).
19. Just 10% of weekly-recognized employees say a monetary reward is the recognition that means most; among the rarely-or-never recognized, it triples to 30%. Matter's report reads this as a warning rather than a preference: when appreciation disappears, cash becomes the only signal left that anyone noticed, and companies without a recognition culture end up paying for the thank-yous they never said (Matter, 2026).
20. Recognition follows a U-shaped risk curve by company size. The smallest companies (1 to 10 employees, 33% rarely or never recognized) and the largest (5,000+, 30%) leave the most people unrecognized, while the 51 to 1,000 employee band does best. Micro-companies lack programs; enterprises lose people in the crowd (Matter, 2026).
21. In Government and public sector (30% recognized weekly or better) and Manufacturing (36%), roughly 3 in 10 employees say they are recognized rarely or never. Technology leads with 61% weekly-or-better recognition and only 9% rarely or never, so the retention risk from a recognition deficit is concentrated in specific industries (Matter, 2026).
22. Planters Bank reduced employee turnover by 36% over three years, with 91% of employees engaged in recognition. Turnover fell from 28% in year one to 22% in year two and 18% in year three across more than 400 employees and 30+ branches, as described in the Planters Bank customer story. The 91% is a participation rate, not an outcome claim; the turnover trend is the outcome, and like every study in this section it is an observed association rather than a controlled experiment.
Remote and hybrid work retention statistics
Earlier versions of this post leaned on pandemic-era surveys about working from home. The evidence below is from 2024 to 2026, and it includes a randomized controlled trial of hybrid work published in Nature.
23. Hybrid work reduced quit rates by one-third, from 7.20% to 4.80%, with no effect on performance grades or promotions over the following two years. The randomized controlled trial covered 1,612 employees at Trip.com in 2021 to 2022, and the reduction in quitting was significant for non-managers, female employees, and those with long commutes (Nature, June 2024, peer-reviewed).
24. 52% of U.S. employees with remote-capable jobs work hybrid, 26% work exclusively remotely, and 22% are fully on-site. Six in 10 remote-capable employees want a hybrid arrangement, about one-third prefer fully remote work, and fewer than 10% prefer to work on-site (Gallup, Indicator: Hybrid Work, data as of May 2026).
25. Six in 10 exclusively remote employees say they are extremely likely to look for a new job if remote flexibility is taken away. Gallup tracks this question in the same hybrid work indicator (Gallup, May 2026), and it is the clearest measure of how much retention risk sits inside a return-to-office mandate.
26. 40% of U.S. workers would start job hunting if hybrid or remote work were eliminated, 22% would expect a raise to make up for the lost flexibility, and 5% would quit outright. On average, workers said they would give up 9% of their annual salary for flexible working hours (Owl Labs, State of Hybrid Work 2025, survey of 2,000 U.S. full-time workers fielded July 2025 with Vitreous World).
27. Fully remote workers are the most likely to be engaged (31%), compared with hybrid (23%), on-site remote-capable (23%), and on-site non-remote-capable (19%) employees. The retention paradox is wellbeing: only 36% of fully remote workers are thriving, versus 42% of hybrid workers, and 27% of fully remote workers experienced loneliness the previous day (Gallup, May 2025, global data).
28. The office is not protective: fully on-site employees are recognized rarely or never at 23.5%, level with fully remote at 23.0%, while hybrid employees fare best at 14.5%. Proximity does not produce appreciation; habits and systems do (Matter, 2026).
What recognition habits that last look like: Matter's platform data
Retention programs fail the same way most recognition programs do: they launch and then fade. These figures come from the 2026 Benchmark Report, which analyzed aggregate, de-identified activity across thousands of active workspaces and 76,000+ members over the trailing twelve months. The findings are correlational: they describe what recognition looks like on teams with different habits, not a controlled experiment.
29. Teams with a weekly recognition ritual give about 2.5x more recognition per member than ad hoc teams. Ritual teams give about one recognition per member every month; ad hoc teams, about one every two and a half months (trimmed means, outliers excluded). Roughly 8 in 10 ritual teams stay active in nearly every month (the 2026 Benchmark Report).
30. Ritual teams stay active in ten or more of eleven months at essentially the same rate whether they have 1 to 50 seats (84%) or 201 to 1,000 seats (87%). At 51 to 200 seats the figure is 89%. Recognition intensity naturally fades as headcount grows, and the weekly ritual is the structure that prevents the fade; structure beats size (the 2026 Benchmark Report).
31. Across more than 92,000 org-chart-verified recognition events, 4 in 5 flow peer to peer (80.9%). Manager-to-report recognition is 12.9%, and 77% of reward coins are earned through peer kudos, so a retention strategy that relies on managers alone is built around a fraction of the activity (the 2026 Benchmark Report).
32. More than 3 in 4 teams that start recognizing on Matter send their first kudos within 24 hours of signing up. The basis is more than 2,500 companies that joined between August 2025 and July 2026, aggregate and de-identified. On the platform overall, almost half of teams send their first recognition within 15 minutes of setup (Matter platform data, 2026; the 15-minute figure is from the 2026 Benchmark Report).
33. 63% of employees say recognition would feel less meaningful if they knew AI wrote or heavily edited it. 36% said much less meaningful and 27% somewhat less, and AI deciding who deserves recognition is the single most uncomfortable AI use tested (39%) (Did AI Kill the ‘Thank You’?, Matter's 2026 survey of 1,021 U.S. professionals). Recognition that is meant to keep people has to come from people.
What the numbers mean for your team
Measure turnover the way the BLS does, then look for the preventable share. Calculate your turnover rate by dividing the number of employees who left during a period by your average headcount for that period, then multiply by 100; retention is the share who stayed. Compare it with the 1.9% monthly quits rate and 3.9-year median tenure above, then read your exit data against Gallup's 2024 finding that 42% of leavers say the departure was preventable and 45% never had a proactive conversation. A short employee retention survey and a stay conversation in the first 90 days are the cheapest interventions on this page.
Make recognition weekly, because frequency is the retention signal. Gallup's 2024 longitudinal study found well-recognized employees 45% less likely to have turned over, yet 1 in 3 employees are still thanked once a month or less. On Matter, a scheduled prompt such as Feedback Friday™ builds the cadence inside Slack or Microsoft Teams, with about a 2-minute setup, no separate login, and no HRIS required. Teams that want employee recognition software for employee retention should track recognition per member each month next to their turnover line, as Planters Bank did across three years, and let peers carry the program: 4 in 5 recognition events on Matter flow peer to peer.
Treat flexibility as retention policy, not a perk. The Nature 2024 trial cut quits by a third with a hybrid schedule and no loss of performance, six in 10 fully remote employees say they would look elsewhere if flexibility were removed, and Matter's 2026 survey found on-site employees go unrecognized at the same rate as remote ones. Whatever your arrangement, an employee retention strategy should cover the habits that travel with people: weekly recognition, a manager who asks, and a retention policy that is written down before the next resignation, not after.
FAQs about employee retention statistics
What is the average employee turnover rate in 2026?
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 3.1 million quits in July 2026, a quits rate of 1.9%, with total separations at 5.1 million or 3.2% of employment. Summed across twelve months, a 1.9% monthly quits rate means more than one in five workers quit in a year. The BLS also found that median employee tenure was 3.9 years in January 2024, down from 4.1 years in January 2022.
How much does employee turnover cost?
SHRM's 2022 benchmarking put the average cost per hire at nearly $4,700 and estimated the total cost of replacing an employee at three to four times the position's salary once soft costs are included. Gallup's 2019 analysis put replacement cost at one-half to two times an employee's annual salary and the annual cost of voluntary turnover to U.S. businesses at $1 trillion. Gallup's 2024 Q12 meta-analysis found top-quartile engagement business units have 21% lower turnover in high-turnover organizations and 51% lower turnover in low-turnover organizations.
Why do employees leave their jobs?
Gallup's 2024 study of 717 voluntary leavers found 42% said their manager or organization could have prevented the departure, and 70% of those preventable exits traced to day-to-day management: personal interactions with the manager, frustrating organizational issues, career advancement, and workload. Work Institute's 2025 Retention Report, based on more than 120,000 exit interviews, put the preventable share at 75%. Pew Research Center's 2022 survey found the top reasons for quitting in 2021 were low pay (63%), no opportunities for advancement (63%), and feeling disrespected (57%), and McKinsey's 2021 study found 54% of leavers did not feel valued by their organization.
Does employee recognition improve retention?
Gallup's September 2024 longitudinal study of nearly 3,500 employees found well-recognized employees were 45% less likely to have turned over two years later and 65% less likely to be watching for another job. Matter's 2026 survey of 1,021 U.S. professionals found 1 in 3 employees are recognized once a month or less, and that the rarely-recognized are three times as likely to say only a monetary reward means anything. In Matter's Planters Bank customer story, turnover fell from 28% to 18% over three years with 91% of employees participating in recognition; that is an observed association, not a controlled experiment.
Does remote or hybrid work improve employee retention?
The strongest evidence is a randomized controlled trial published in Nature in June 2024: hybrid work at Trip.com reduced quit rates by one-third, from 7.20% to 4.80%, with no effect on performance or promotions. Gallup's hybrid work indicator, with data as of May 2026, found 52% of remote-capable U.S. employees work hybrid and six in 10 fully remote employees would be extremely likely to look for a new job if flexibility were removed. Matter's 2026 survey adds that on-site and fully remote employees are recognized rarely or never at the same rate (23.5% and 23.0%), while hybrid employees fare best at 14.5%.
Final thoughts on employee retention statistics
The 2026 picture is consistent across the BLS, Gallup, Work Institute, and Matter's own research: quits have cooled but tenure is shrinking, most departures were preventable, and the people who leave say nobody asked and nobody noticed. Recognition is the part of that problem a team can fix this week. If you want more employee retention ideas, start with the habit the data rewards: a weekly recognition ritual that peers run themselves. You can get started with Matter for free in Slack or Microsoft Teams. Every new workspace begins with a 14-day free trial and then lands on Matter's Free plan, which is for unlimited users.
