Employee engagement statistics 2026: 20% engaged worldwide, 31% in the U.S.
By Jan Suski. I go deep on every review, checking every number against its source and digging up details other coverage misses, a habit from six years of SEO and link building for tech companies. Bylines at Surfer, Brand24, and Senuto. How the scoring works.
The numbers Global and U.S. employee engagement, checked 15 October 2026
Gallup's global and U.S. series agree on direction: engagement has slid since 2020 and hasn't recovered.
Manager engagement lost 9 points in three years while non-manager engagement moved by a single point.
The 48-point gap between Gallup's 20% and Qualtrics' 68% is a definitions gap, so quote either figure with its publisher attached.
One in five employees worldwide was engaged at work in 2025. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 puts global employee engagement at 20%, down from 23% in 2022 and 2023, with 64% not engaged and 16% actively disengaged. The U.S. sits higher at 31%, and it hasn't moved off that number since 2024.
Vendor surveys tell a different story. Qualtrics reported a 68% engagement rate across 33,831 employees in its 2026 Employee Experience Trends study, more than three times Gallup's global figure. Both numbers are real. They count different things, and this page lays out which house measured what, how, and when.
The employee engagement statistics below come from the bodies that collected them: Gallup's World Poll and U.S. panel, its Q12 meta-analysis, Qualtrics, Culture Amp, Achievers and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Every figure carries its publisher and date, so anyone quoting employee engagement rates can check them at the source.
The report covers global and U.S. engagement, managers, generations, costs, remote work and retention, then explains why the houses disagree. It's written for HR leaders, people analysts and executives who put engagement numbers in plans and board decks, where picking the wrong house shifts the headline figure by 48 points.
Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025
Global employee engagement dropped for a second straight year, from 21% in 2024 to 20% in 2025, the lowest reading since 2020. Gallup's 2026 report calls it the first back-to-back decline in a series that started at 12% in 2009 and peaked at 23% in 2022 and 2023. The 2025 wave drew on 263,810 respondents, 141,444 of them employed.
Scale matters here. Gallup says each point of global engagement represents about 21 million employees worldwide, so the slide from 23% to 20% covers roughly 63 million engaged employees. Every region held or lost engagement in 2025, and South Asia posted the largest fall at 5 points.
Regional employee engagement levels run from 31% to 12%:
| Region (Gallup, 2025) | Engaged | Thriving | Daily stress |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States and Canada | 31% | 51% | 50% |
| Latin America and the Caribbean | 30% | 56% | 43% |
| Southeast Asia | 25% | 36% | 25% |
| Australia and New Zealand | 21% | 55% | 49% |
| South Asia | 21% | 16% | 30% |
| East Asia | 18% | 32% | 46% |
| Middle East and North Africa | 14% | 26% | 48% |
| Europe | 12% | 49% | 39% |
Europe is the odd one out. Workforce engagement there ranks last at 12%, the lowest workplace engagement of any region, while 49% of its employees rate their lives well enough to count as thriving employees, close to the U.S. and Canada figure. Gallup's thriving measure is a life-evaluation rating, so it picks up pay, health and work life balance together, and a European worker can score high on it with a lukewarm attachment to the job.
Thriving held at 34% worldwide in 2025, one point up on 2024. Daily stress is lower: 40% of employees report it in the 2025 data, below the 44% peak of 2021 and 2022 and still above the 31% Gallup recorded in 2009.
U.S. employee engagement: 31% engaged, 17% actively disengaged
U.S. employee engagement peaked at 36% in 2020, then slipped to 34% in 2021 and 32% in 2022, ticked up to 33% in 2023 and fell to 31% in 2024, where it stayed for 2025. The January 2026 Gallup release drew on 78,945 working adults and found 17% of U.S. employees actively disengaged in both 2024 and 2025. That leaves roughly 1.8 engaged employees for each of the actively disengaged employees, against 2.6 in 2020.
The latest employee engagement statistics from the U.S. panel show no rebound. Gallup's July 2026 update read 31% engaged in May 2026, from 43,262 responses. Gallup sizes each point at about 1.6 million workers, which leaves the U.S. about 8 million engaged employees short of its 2020 level. A 31% reading is par for the course in a U.S. employee engagement series that hasn't topped 36% in 26 years.
When employee engagement fell after 2020, younger workers fell furthest. Gen Z and younger millennials dropped from 40% engaged in 2020 to 32% in 2025. Baby boomers were the most engaged group at 34%, followed by Gen Z and younger millennials at 32%, older millennials at 30% and Gen X at 29%.
The Q12 items behind those drops show where employees feel the gap. Among Gen Z and younger millennials, the share of employees who strongly agree that:
- someone at work cares about them fell from 54% to 41%
- someone encourages their development fell from 45% to 36%
- they have had opportunities to learn and grow fell from 48% to 37%
- the company's mission makes their job feel important fell from 37% to 28%
- they know what's expected of them fell from 51% to 42%
Older millennials posted the same pattern, with "someone cares about me" falling from 51% to 39% and encouragement to develop from 41% to 31%. Across all U.S. employees, clarity of expectations dropped 9 points and feeling cared about dropped 8 points between 2020 and 2025. Career growth and basic clarity, two things a manager controls at no cost, took the biggest hits.
Why the published engagement statistics diverge
How many employees feel engaged at work depends on who asks. Six published employee engagement rates run from 20% to 70%. The spread comes from two choices each house makes: what counts as engaged, and who answers the survey.
| House | Engaged | Who was asked | Fieldwork |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gallup World Poll | 20% | 141,444 employed adults, random samples in each country | January to December 2025 |
| Achievers Workforce Institute | 25% | 2,500 employees in 8 countries | October 2025 |
| Gallup U.S. panel | 31% | 78,945 U.S. workers, probability-based panel | 2025 |
| Qualtrics Employee Experience Trends | 68% | 33,831 employees at organizations with 100 to 50,000+ staff, 24 countries | September to October 2025 |
| Culture Amp benchmark | 69% | About 20 client organizations, U.S. consumer goods and services | July 2025 to June 2026 |
| Gallup best-practice clients | 70% | Organizations in Gallup's own benchmark database | 2025 |
Definitions do most of the work. Gallup sorts workers into three groups, from engaged through not-engaged to actively disengaged, with a proprietary formula across its 12 Q12 items, and its published item results report only the share who strongly agree. Qualtrics publishes an engagement rate and Culture Amp an engagement score, each built from agreement with its own question set.
A worker who agrees, short of strongly agreeing, lands in Gallup's not-engaged middle and in a vendor's engaged column at the same time. That one step on the answer scale moves a worker between columns, and it's the first reason a 31% and a 68% can describe similar workforces. Gallup's label for the opposite pole is actively disengaged, and its scheme has no actively engaged tier above plain engaged.
Sampling does the rest. Gallup's World Poll samples employed adults at random, small firms and informal work included. Culture Amp's benchmark comes from companies that bought an engagement platform and chose to survey their people, a self-selected group of employers paying to work on company culture. Gallup's own client base shows the effect: its best-practice organizations averaged 70% engaged in 2025, against 20% for the world.
Benchmark samples also score high on clarity. In Culture Amp's segment, 90% of employees agree they know how their work contributes to company goals, so by their own account employees understand where they fit. Gallup's closest item, knowing what's expected at work, draws strong agreement from 49% of U.S. workers; the items differ, and the agree-versus-strongly-agree split widens that 41-point gap again.
Achievers lands near Gallup at 25% because its December 2025 release counts employees who feel both appreciated and engaged, a stricter bar than engagement alone. In the same survey, only 17% of employees feel fairly compensated and 21% of employees feel connected to their peers. Read between the lines of any roundup quoting employee engagement data without the publisher's definition, because the word covers a 50-point range.
Manager engagement fell from 31% to 22%
Manager engagement dropped faster than any other number in Gallup's global series: 31% in 2022, 30% in 2023, 27% in 2024 and 22% in 2025. Non-manager engagement barely moved, from 20% to 19% over the same years. The 5-point manager drop between 2024 and 2025 was the largest single-year fall in the set.
Gallup's case for keeping an eye on that number dates to an April 2015 article by Jim Harter and Amy Adkins: "Our research shows that managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee engagement scores." When the people running teams disengage, team engagement follows them down.
The top of the house is a red flag too. Gallup's 2026 report puts senior leaders at 26% engaged worldwide, with 46% reporting daily stress, 7 points above individual contributors. In best-practice organizations, 79% of managers were engaged, more than three times the global manager rate.
What engaged teams deliver: the Q12 meta-analysis
Gallup's 11th Q12 meta-analysis, published May 2024, pooled 736 studies across 347 organizations in 53 industries and 90 countries, covering 183,806 business units and 3,354,784 employees. It compares highly engaged teams in the top quartile with bottom-quartile units on the same business outcomes, and Gallup's case that employee engagement drives organizational success rests on this data set.
Where team engagement sat in the top quartile, highly engaged business units posted 23% higher profitability and 18% higher productivity measured by sales, plus 14% higher productivity on production records. Absenteeism ran 78% lower and safety incidents 63% lower. Turnover was 21% lower in high turnover organizations, defined as above 40% annual turnover, and 51% lower in low turnover organizations at 40% or less.
Customer loyalty showed the smallest gap at 10%, a useful check on claims that engaged teams lift customer focus scores by double digits. The devil's in the details: these are median differences between the best and worst quartiles inside Gallup's client data. They describe the spread between highly engaged businesses and disengaged ones, and a company moving its average up a few points should expect a fraction of them.
The lion's share of the measured gap between highly engaged businesses and the bottom quartile sits in attendance and safety: absenteeism, safety incidents and patient safety incidents all top 55%, while every financial outcome sits at 23% or below. Units with highly engaged employees also post 70% higher wellbeing, the second-largest gap in the set.
The cost of low engagement to the global economy
Gallup prices low engagement at about $10 trillion in lost productivity across the world economy in 2025, or 9% of global GDP. For the U.S., its July 2026 update estimates that employees who are not engaged or actively disengaged cost the economy about $2 trillion a year.
Those low engagement costs have grown with the method, and the earlier estimate looks like a drop in the bucket next to the current one. In June 2013, Gallup put the cost of actively disengaged employees at $450 billion to $550 billion a year in the U.S. The 2026 figure adds the not-engaged majority to the bill of employee disengagement, which is why it runs about four times higher.
Achievers prices a different loss. It estimates U.S. employers will lose $1.3 trillion to $5.1 trillion to attrition in 2026 if 34% of the full-time workforce switches jobs, using median salary and standard replacement-cost ranges. That's a turnover cost model for disengaged employees who leave, a different loss from Gallup's productivity figure, so the two shouldn't be summed.
Engagement by work location: remote employees and hybrid workers
Exclusively remote employees post the highest engagement among U.S. work arrangements in Gallup's remote work data. Its location tracker lists 37% engaged for exclusively remote workers, 34% for hybrid workers, 29% for on-site staff in remote-capable jobs and 28% for on-site staff whose jobs can't be done remotely.
Hybrid workers lead on wellbeing at 54% thriving, ahead of remote staff at 52%. Gallup's July 2026 release also names hybrid workers among the employee groups with the sharpest declines since 2020. Who works from home and how many do is a separate question, covered in the remote work statistics report.
Employee retention, quits and job hunting
These employee engagement statistics show employee disengagement in job-hunting plans before it shows up in quits data. The BLS JOLTS release of 29 September 2026 counted 3.1 million quits in August 2026, a 1.9% quits rate, with 7.1 million job openings and 5.2 million hires.
Intentions run far ahead of that rate. In Achievers' October 2025 survey, 34% of employees said they plan to get a new job in 2026, another 22% were considering one, and only 25% pictured a long career with their current employer. Culture Amp's U.S. consumer goods benchmark found 21% of employees actively seeking or thinking about other jobs.
Purpose separates the stayers from the leavers. In a November 2025 Gallup survey of 4,475 U.S. workers, 68% of employees with low work purpose were looking for a new job, against 41% of those with strong purpose. Employee retention plans that skip purpose miss the mark by that 27-point gap.
What drives employee engagement: purpose, managers, AI and listening
Gallup and Qualtrics publish engagement splits for four factors that drive employee engagement: purpose, managers, AI support and listening. Purpose carries the biggest multiplier. Gallup found employees with a strong sense of purpose 5.6 times as likely to be engaged as those with low purpose, at 50% against 9%. Only 18% said their current job has a purpose they believe in, while 30% said their ideal job would.
Manager support for AI is the newest lever. Gallup found 6 points higher employee engagement in organizations that have adopted AI than in those that haven't, though only 12% of U.S. employees agree strongly that AI has transformed how work gets done in their organization.
In AI-adopting U.S. organizations, 48% of employees whose managers actively support AI use were engaged, against 30% without that support, and 53% were engaged where frequent use, a clear integration plan and manager support all applied. Frequent AI use itself reached 79% where managers actively support AI, against 46% where they don't.
Listening has its own number. Qualtrics' 2026 Employee Experience Trends study found 87% engagement among employees whose employer listens more than before, 66% where listening stayed the same and 44% where it fell. Engagement also tracked the type of change employees report: 78% after new technology, 67% after leadership changes and 61% after layoffs.
Those figures add up to a short engagement strategy for anyone trying to improve employee engagement: clear expectations, a manager who backs development and AI use, and employee feedback that gets acted on. Easier said than done, since only 49% of U.S. employees strongly agree they know what's expected of them, 12 points below the 2015 peak of 61%.
How companies measure employee engagement
Companies measure employee engagement with annual census surveys, shorter pulse surveys between waves, or both. Employee engagement measured on Gallup's Q12 and on a vendor index produces two different numbers, and three engagement measures dominate the published figures:
- Gallup Q12: 12 statements, scored into three groups: engaged, the not-engaged middle and actively disengaged
- Vendor engagement indexes: an engagement rate or score from agreement with a short item set, as Qualtrics and Culture Amp publish
- eNPS: the share of promoters minus detractors on a 0 to 10 recommend question; Culture Amp's U.S. consumer goods median is 14
Employee surveys compare only against the benchmark built on the same instrument. A company scoring 69% on Culture Amp's index sits at the median of that peer group, and an engaged workforce of 31% on Gallup's scale is average for the U.S. Culture Amp, an employee experience vendor, publishes its benchmarks by industry, region and company size. Platforms and their costs are compared in the survey software pricing report and the Qualtrics pricing teardown.
Engagement and job satisfaction measure different things. Gallup's Q12 reads company culture through questions on expectations, tools, recognition, development and mission, so a satisfied employee who coasts reads as not engaged, and loyal, committed employees can score low on it, since tenure never enters the Q12.
Teams trying to improve employee engagement should pick the instrument first and the target second. Teams tracking engagement data and engagement trends alongside hiring and attrition figures can use workforce intelligence software or the methods in the labor market intelligence guide.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of employees are engaged at work?
Gallup counts 20% of employees worldwide and 31% of U.S. employees as engaged for 2025. Vendor surveys report higher shares, with Qualtrics at 68% across 24 countries, because they count agreement where Gallup's results key on strong agreement.
What is a good employee engagement score?
On Gallup's scale, anything above the U.S. average of 31% beats the national norm, and its best-practice organizations average 70%. On vendor indexes, compare against that vendor's own benchmark, such as Culture Amp's 69% for U.S. consumer goods companies.
What are the current trends in employee engagement?
The main engagement trends: a second straight annual decline in Gallup's global data, a 9-point drop in manager engagement since 2022, and an 8-point fall among younger U.S. workers since 2020. Qualtrics also recorded a 3-point fall to 68% in its 2026 study.
How can I measure employee engagement?
Run a validated survey such as Gallup's Q12 or a vendor engagement index, then track the same items over time. Add pulse surveys and eNPS between annual waves, and compare results only with the benchmark tied to that instrument.
What is the projected state of employee engagement in 2026?
Gallup's U.S. readings for February and May 2026 both came in at 31% engaged, flat on 2025. Gallup published its 2025 U.S. annual figure in January 2026 and its global figure in April 2026, and full-year 2026 figures follow the same calendar.
Bottom line
In a nutshell, the employee engagement stats worth quoting carry a publisher and a definition. Gallup's 20% global and 31% U.S. figures come from random and probability samples with a strict bar; Qualtrics' 68% comes from an online study of employees at organizations with 100 or more staff and Culture Amp's 69% from client surveys, both with a looser bar.
The direction matches in every series that reports a trend: down since 2020, with managers and younger workers falling furthest.
The Q12 meta-analysis supplies the business case for engaged employees in absenteeism, safety and profitability gaps, and Gallup's $10 trillion estimate supplies the scale. Anyone comparing their own score should hold it against the benchmark from the same instrument, and anyone citing employee engagement statistics should name the house, the year and the definition next to the number.
Where each engagement figure comes from, and the conversion no house publishes
Gallup: gallup.com (State of the Global Workplace 2026, April 2026; U.S. engagement release, January 2026; U.S. update, July 2026; purpose survey, November 2025; Q12 meta-analysis, 11th edition, May 2024; Harter and Adkins on managers, April 2015; remote and hybrid location tracker) and news.gallup.com (June 2013 cost estimate).
Vendor studies: qualtrics.com (2026 Employee Experience Trends, February 2026, fieldwork September to October 2025), cultureamp.com (U.S. consumer goods and services benchmark, July 2025 to June 2026) and businesswire.com (Achievers Workforce Institute release, December 2025, fieldwork October 2025).
Official data: bls.gov (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey release of 29 September 2026, covering August 2026).
Every figure was checked against its source on 15 October 2026. No house publishes a conversion between Gallup's Q12 groups and a vendor engagement rate, so each figure on this page stays attached to its own instrument.