Quiet Quitting Statistics: What the Engagement Data Shows

"Quiet quitting" went viral in 2022 to describe people who do what their job requires and nothing more. For an HR leader, the label matters less than the question behind it: how many of your people have stopped putting energy into their work, and what is that costing you?

That question usually arrives with a budget attached. Someone wants to fund an engagement program, and finance wants to know whether the problem is big enough to justify it. This guide sets out what the primary research says about how common quiet quitting is, who is most affected, what it costs and what moves it, then shows how to size the cost in your own organization.

DisclosureJake Jorgovan co-founded Alpha Apex Group, which is mentioned in this article.

What counts as quiet quitting in the data?

Most figures on this page come from Gallup, which measures employee engagement with a 12-item survey (the Q12) and sorts people into three groups. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report (opens in a new tab) distinguishes three groups:

• Engaged: employees who are committed to and energized by their work and workplace.
• Not engaged: employees who show up and do the work without real connection to it. Gallup calls this group "quietly quitting".
• Actively disengaged: employees who are unhappy that their needs are not met and show it in ways that can undermine colleagues. Gallup calls them "loudly quitting".

Gallup put a number on the trend in its September 2022 article Is Quiet Quitting Real? (opens in a new tab): quiet quitters made up "at least 50% of the U.S. workforce". That figure was the not-engaged share of 15,091 US employees surveyed in June 2022.

One distinction helps when you read any figure on this page. Gallup's engaged category is a higher bar than satisfaction: someone can be content with their job and still not be engaged by Gallup's definition.

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Pew found 76% of U.S. workers said they did more than expected in October 2024. Self-reported effort and Gallup’s engagement categories measure different things; these percentages should not be treated as competing estimates of quiet quitting.pewresearch.org (opens in a new tab)

How many employees are quietly quitting?

Worldwide, 20% of employees were engaged in 2025, 64% were not engaged and 16% were actively disengaged, according to Gallup's 2026 global data (opens in a new tab). The report, published in April 2026, draws on 141,444 employed respondents surveyed during 2025. On Gallup's definition, roughly two in three employees worldwide were quietly quitting.

Global engagement fell for the second year in a row, from a peak of 23% in 2022. Gallup notes this is the first time it has dropped two years running. Over the longer run the trend is still upward: engagement was 12% in Gallup's first measurement in 2009.

In the United States, engagement is higher but has slipped since it peaked at 36% in 2020. On Gallup's US engagement indicator (opens in a new tab), 31% of employees were engaged and 17% actively disengaged as of May 2026, which leaves about 52% not engaged.

Gallup's annual update for 2024 (opens in a new tab), based on 79,087 employees, called that year's result a 10-year low, matching 2014. Each percentage point represents about 1.6 million US employees.

How engagement varies by region

Engagement varies widely by region. Since 2025 Gallup reports regional figures as three-year averages.

Europe has the lowest engagement of any region, and South Asia had the largest fall in 2025, at five points.

How engagement varies by age, role and work location

Gallup's 2025 global data shows modest gaps by age and larger ones by where people work.

Younger workers. The age gap is small in Gallup's global data. In the US, younger workers have lost the most ground: Gallup found the 2024 decline was most pronounced among workers under 35, with Gen Z five points less engaged than a year earlier and lower scores on basics such as clear expectations, recognition and having the right equipment. The Conference Board's 2025 job satisfaction survey (opens in a new tab) of 1,700 US workers found a similar age gap on a different measure: 57.4% of workers under 25 were satisfied with their jobs, against 72.4% of those 55 and older.

Remote work. Of the four work-location groups, fully remote employees were the most engaged worldwide in 2025, and on-site workers whose jobs cannot be done remotely were the least. Those figures describe the groups, not the effect of moving a given team on-site or home.

Why employees quietly quit

Gallup's own diagnosis is direct. In 2022 it wrote that "quiet quitting is a symptom of poor management". Its 2024 US update attributes falling engagement to rapid organizational change, the move to hybrid and remote work, new customer and employee expectations, and broken performance management practices.

People who have left say something similar. In Gallup's November 2023 survey, voluntary leavers who said their exit could have been prevented named what would have kept them. Pay and benefits made up 30% of those actions. The rest concerned how people were managed day to day, such as more positive interactions with their manager (21%), fixing frustrating organizational issues (13%), career advancement (11%) and staffing, workload or scheduling (9%). Those answers came from 1,336 people who had left an employer at any time.

Managers are where the decline is

The most useful finding for anyone deciding where to spend is about managers. Gallup reports that lower engagement among managers accounts for most of the recent downturn. Global manager engagement fell from 27% in 2024 to 22% in 2025, and nine points since 2022. In Gallup's words, managers "are increasingly only as engaged as those they lead".

That matters because managers shape everyone else's numbers. Gallup estimates that managers account for at least 70% of the variance (opens in a new tab) in team engagement, from an analysis of 11,781 work teams. In best-practice organizations it studied in 2025, 79% of managers were engaged, nearly four times the global average, and Gallup puts average engagement in best-practice organizations at 70%.

The US element scores show what employees are missing. In May 2026, only 49% of US employees strongly agreed that they knew what was expected of them at work, and 29% strongly agreed that they had received recognition or praise for good work in the previous seven days. Clarity of expectations was among the elements that fell most in 2024; at 46% that year, it was 10 points below its March 2020 high of 56%.

I wrote about this in 2019, after my adviser Alex McClafferty taught me that a business is a reflection of its leader: "Whatever you bring to the table as a leader, your team will mirror that back to you and in how they operate within your company." Gallup's manager data points the same way at a much larger scale. A program aimed only at frontline employees misses the people who most shape how engaged those employees are.

What low engagement costs

Gallup publishes a modeled global cost of low engagement and evidence on how business units with high and low engagement perform. Its global estimate covers both not-engaged and actively disengaged employees, so it is wider than quiet quitting alone. Gallup also sells engagement services, so treat these as the publisher's own estimates.

The macro estimate. Gallup estimates that low engagement cost the world economy about $10 trillion in lost productivity in 2025, or 9% of global GDP. It is a model: Gallup applies the relationship between engagement and productivity from its research to output per worker in each country. It shows scale; it says nothing about your company.

The business-unit evidence. Gallup's Q12 meta-analysis (opens in a new tab) (11th edition, May 2024) compared 183,806 business and work units in 347 organizations, covering 3,354,784 employees. Units in the top quarter for engagement outperformed those in the bottom quarter by these median margins (lower absenteeism, safety incidents, turnover and defects; higher profitability, productivity and loyalty):

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Selected median differences between Gallup’s top- and bottom-quartile engagement units. Bars share a scale; associations are not estimates of the return from an engagement intervention.

These are differences between units with high and low engagement. They do not show the return on raising it, and Gallup itself says the differences "should be calculated for each organization". Use them as a guide to which outcomes to measure, not as a forecast.

Turnover. Disengaged employees are more likely to be looking: Gallup reports that engaged employees are 47% less likely to be job hunting than those who are not engaged. Gallup estimates replacement costs (opens in a new tab) at around 200% of salary for leaders and managers, 80% for technical professionals and 40% for frontline employees. The same article reports a November 2023 survey of 717 US employees who had voluntarily left an employer in the previous year and now worked elsewhere: 42% said their manager or organization could have done something to keep them.

Not everyone who disengages leaves. Gallup's May 2026 survey found 52% of US employees watching for or actively seeking a new job (opens in a new tab), while 28% said it was a good time to find a quality job. Many people who are open to leaving are still on the payroll.

US job satisfaction hit a record high in 2026. Does that contradict the engagement data?

Not necessarily. The Conference Board's 2026 survey (opens in a new tab) found 68.9% of US workers satisfied with their jobs, the highest level since it began tracking in 1987. Satisfaction with individual elements of the job averaged 59%, and its researcher Allan Schweyer said the overall high "may reflect that workers are grateful to be employed amid widespread uncertainty".

Because engagement is the higher bar, the two can move apart: people can be satisfied enough to stay and still not be engaged. If your own survey reports a satisfaction or "percent favorable" score, don't compare it with Gallup's engagement figures as if they measured the same thing.

How to size the cost of disengagement in your organization

A national average will not persuade a CFO, and it may not describe your company. The figures above are better used to decide what to measure.

1. 1

   Measure your own engagement split

   Use your own survey results, broken down by team and manager. A global or US benchmark tells you what is typical; it does not tell you where your disengaged teams are. Check whether your survey measures engagement or satisfaction before you compare it with any published figure.

2. 2

   Price your turnover by role family

   Count voluntary leavers over the last 12 months by role family and apply a replacement cost to each: your own recruiting, vacancy and ramp-up costs if you have them, or Gallup's estimates (around 40% of salary for frontline roles, 80% for technical professionals, 200% for leaders and managers) as a stated assumption. The employee turnover statistics guide covers replacement-cost estimates in more detail.

3. 3

   Compare your least and most engaged teams

   Set absence, turnover, quality and output side by side for teams doing comparable work, over the same period. Gallup's meta-analysis shows which outcomes usually differ most. Role, location and tenure can explain part of any gap, so present it as a difference associated with engagement, then judge which losses a program could realistically prevent.

4. 4

   Present a range and its assumptions

   Give finance a low and a high savings scenario, each based on a stated reduction in preventable losses, and set each against the program's annual cost, including internal time. Keep total turnover cost apart from the avoidable share, and don't count the same loss twice under turnover and productivity.

A hypothetical example shows the scale of the turnover line alone. A company that loses 150 frontline employees a year at an average salary of $50,000 would, at Gallup's 40% estimate, face about $3 million in replacement costs. That is the total, not what a program would save. On the same assumption, each departure avoided represents $20,000 in estimated replacement costs. Dividing a program's annual cost by $20,000 gives the modeled break-even number of departures; use your own avoidable cost per departure when you have it.

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Illustrative scenario from the article; figures are assumptions, not market benchmarks.

Where an engagement budget does the most good

Gallup's own recommendations and the data above point the same way: start with managers.

• Re-engage managers first. Lower manager engagement accounts for most of the recent decline, and managers account for most of the variance in their teams' engagement. Gallup recommends selecting managers for their ability to engage and inspire employees, and upskilling them through clear priorities, ongoing feedback and accountability.
• Make expectations clear. Fewer than half of US employees strongly agreed that they knew what was expected of them at work in May 2026. That is a management task before it is a program.
• Have the conversation before the exit. In Gallup's November 2023 survey of voluntary leavers, 45% said neither a manager nor another leader had proactively discussed their job satisfaction, performance or future with them in the three months before they left. Gallup's 2022 advice was one meaningful conversation per week with each team member, of 15 to 30 minutes.
• Track engagement alongside satisfaction. The Conference Board recommends tracking engagement, belonging and intent to stay alongside satisfaction, and analyzing satisfaction drivers by employee segment instead of relying on the overall average.

Gallup reports that organizations it has worked with gained, on average, half a standard deviation in engagement between the first and second year, and often a full standard deviation after three or more years. Plan to measure progress over repeated survey cycles, with review points and continued funding tied to your own results.

When you look at your own survey results, which managers' teams are the least engaged, and what are those managers being asked to do differently?