Glassdoor’s Worklife Trends 2026

2025 was a turbulent year marked by uncertainty. Heading into 2026, employers and employees face powerful crosswinds against the backdrop of a softening job market, AI advancements, and policy uncertainty. Many of these changes put workers and their leaders at odds, making the connection between employees and leaders feel more tense than ever.

Employees are less engaged in the workplace, feeling that they aren’t being rewarded for their effort with recognition or career advancement. With power in the job market shifting back to employers, they have applied more pressure to workers with unpopular decisions, from layoffs to return-to-office policies.

The 2026 worklife trends report explores the  growing disconnect between employees and their leaders and potential contributing factors: the “forever layoff,” the decay of connection and opportunity for remote workers (and the slow-mo RTO that decay is triggering), a take-what-you-can-get job market, and AI adoption. Yet amid the challenges, there’s a bright spot: real wages for recent grads are catching up to 2020 levels, particularly in emerging cities. 

To navigate the current environment’s ongoing and overlapping crises, it is more important than ever for employees and leaders to work together.

Ratings of senior leadership hovering well below their pandemic peak as workers lose faith in their leaders. Words highlighting this disconnection are up in Glassdoor reviews - 24% for disconnect, 25% for miscommunication, 26% for distrust and a whopping 149% for misalignment.

Workers enter the new year highly skeptical of what their leaders say and the decisions they make. Compared to the historically hot labor market of the great resignation, employees have much less leverage over their employers. That shift in power dynamics came at the same time as other major changes in the way we work - from layoffs to RTO to AI transformation. Workers are questioning how leadership will represent the workers’ interests amid all those changes.

Glassdoor reviews of senior management indicate that employees have been losing faith in their leadership since the latter half of 2023. Ratings peaked as leaders navigated the pandemic, and returned to roughly pre-pandemic levels in 2022. Ratings started to decline in 2023, however, as workers became more critical of their leadership, reaching a low point in early 2024 and only slightly rebounding in 2025.

While this trend tends to play out across industries, both the starting point and the size of the decline varies substantially. Below, we identify three of the industries with the biggest declines: management & consulting, media & communication, and technology.

In these industries, leaders won a high level of trust from 2020-2022 during the height of the pandemic, but workers have started to become more critical as leaders manage an extremely dynamic environment. Consider how consulting firms were well-positioned to dominate AI transformation but are still struggling to develop an AI playbook that delivers value to their clients, how supercharged market consolidation in media & communications has led to an ongoing drumbeat of layoffs, or how once dream jobs in tech have entered the “shut up and grind” era.

This disconnect between employees and leaders shows in how employees talk about their leaders. In Glassdoor reviews that mention senior leadership or management, the share of reviews that mention “disconnect” has increased 24% from 2024 to 2025. Similarly, related terms like misaligned (+149%), miscommunication (+25%), hypocrisy (+18%) and distrust (+26%) have all surged in Glassdoor reviews over the last year.

The twin forces of quickly-changing market conditions and declining worker power in the labor market will drive leaders to keep making big strategic moves while workers suffer from burnout and job insecurity. This is a recipe for decaying trust.

Small layoffs (<50 individuals) are now the most common type, rising from 38% of layoffs in 2015 to 51% in 2025, and that trend will stoke worker anxiety as it continues in 2026.

Employers have started engaging in smaller but regular layoffs instead of infrequent but large cuts. We call these ongoing layoffs the “forever layoff” as job cuts come in never-ending waves instead of a tsunami. Our research on layoffs demonstrated that mass layoffs have a durable impact on Glassdoor ratings from remaining employees, but the forever layoff is not a discrete event. Rolling layoffs may give companies a way to reduce headcount without making headlines, but they create cultures of anxiety, insecurity and resentment at companies.

After a layoff spike in 2020 during the pandemic and historically low layoff levels in 2021-2022, the number of workers laid off each month has crept back up, stabilizing at a level similar to what we saw in the 2010s. The backdrop has worsened for the laid off workers, who need to search in a low-hire market.

WARN Act notices, where companies must announce closures and layoffs, make up the most comprehensive layoffs dataset. Small layoffs (fewer than 50 workers) make up a much larger proportion of these notices than they did a decade ago, rising from 38% in 2015 to 51% in 2025. Even this likely understates the rise in mini-layoffs, as the federal WARN Act doesn’t require filings for small layoffs of less than 50 people and only a handful of states have more stringent reporting thresholds.

Glassdoor reviews provide another view into the forever layoff: layoffs are on reviewers’ minds, and they are feeling less secure in their jobs. We tracked mentions of layoffs (or related terms) and job insecurity in Glassdoor reviews. Both spiked during the pandemic, but the rates in late 2025 were already higher than they were in March 2020. 

Companies may see the forever layoff as a way to trim their payrolls without drawing headlines or backlash. While serial layoffs may fly under the radar, they don’t fool the employees who take on more work afterwards and wonder if they might be next. The persistent drag from forever layoffs are likely to damage worker morale and workplace culture in 2026 and beyond.

Average career opportunity ratings on Glassdoor have fallen from 4.1 in 2020 to 3.5 in 2025 for remote & hybrid workers. As employers prioritize in-person workers for career growth, the pressure for workers to return to the office will increase.

Workers will keep trickling back into the office as the prospects for career growth and connection dim with remote and hybrid work. While 2025 was marked by high profile RTO mandates, the number of work-from-home days and full-time remote or hybrid workers was basically flat after decreasing dramatically in 2021 & 2022. Mandates varied substantially in terms of the number of in-office days required and the threatened penalties for non-compliance, but they did little to decrease aggregate work-from-home rates. Stanford economist Nick Bloom has likened RTO mandates to laws against jaywalking: everyone knows about them, but compliance and enforcement are spotty.

In Glassdoor reviews, we can see another force that pushes workers back into the office: the fear of being out of sight and out of mind. Ratings are falling for workers who use the words “remote” or “hybrid” when listing workplace pros. 

Not all ratings are now worse: work-life balance ratings are still higher for workers who list hybrid or remote work as a pro, though that premium has declined since 2020. Other important subratings tell a different story. Overall ratings and ratings of career opportunities and senior management were previously highest for these workers, but have all now fallen to lower levels for the workers who mention remote or hybrid work.

As employers implicitly or even explicitly prioritize in-person workers for promotions and career opportunities, remote and hybrid workers are being left behind. Over the last few years, that has manifested as declining job satisfaction from remote and hybrid workers. In 2026 and moving forward, remote and hybrid work aren’t going to disappear, but workers will be pressured to make more explicit trade-offs between flexibility and career advancement. RTO will continue in slow-motion as workers who prioritize career advancement will trickle back into the office in response to the forced choice between working from home, or getting the recognition they deserve.

Employee satisfaction in occupations with high exposure to AI declined slightly relative to other occupations since 2022. Even as AI adoption spreads through the economy, it is difficult to find evidence of a broad impact on workers so far.

Businesses have pushed aggressively to implement AI in the three years since ChatGPT was publicly released. Employees are anxious about the pressure to show results with AI at work, skeptical of AI’s ability to help them produce high-quality work, and concerned that their jobs will be automated away regardless of their effort. We compare how employee satisfaction on Glassdoor has trended for the 20% most exposed occupations to AI compared to all other occupations from 2022 to 2025.

Overall employer ratings on Glassdoor from employees in high AI exposure occupations have declined only slightly by an additional 0.02 stars (on a 1–to–5 scale) compared to other occupations, a statistically significant but practically negligible difference. Career opportunities ratings, which might be impacted more by AI fears, show the same 0.02 star drop. By contrast, previous Glassdoor data found that 56% of professionals worried that AI would influence their long-term job security and about 3 in 5 of mentions of AI in Glassdoor reviews are negative. So far, the data suggests that factors other than AI exposure are more important drivers of employee (dis)satisfaction.

One area where there is slightly more impact is for early career workers. The difference is about twice as large (-0.05 stars) for early career workers in high AI exposure occupations, but remains practically small.

Why is the impact from AI still so small? While most businesses are experimenting with AI, many have not figured out how to effectively integrate it into business processes. For select occupations that are exceptionally vulnerable to LLMs’ current capabilities, we do see much larger drops in ratings. For example, translators (-0.55 stars), software engineers (-0.29 stars), and copywriters (-0.14 stars) have seen a much larger decline in career opportunities ratings since 2022, but ultimately, these occupations represent a small share of the U.S. workforce. Conversely, some occupations that have high exposure to AI like marketing coordinator (+0.002 stars), web designer (+0.02 stars) and data analyst (-0.02 stars) have seen little change in career opportunities ratings.

AI has the potential to significantly disrupt the job market, but we are not seeing large-scale changes yet. Even if AI has already had a large impact on small pockets of the job market, it will take time for it to show up in the aggregate data. As businesses chip away at the difficult process of adopting AI in 2026, we expect many anecdotes but limited data about AI’s impacts rather than major upheaval in the labor market from AI.

Job applicants were 12% less likely to reject a job offer in 2025 than they were in 2023. With hiring rates at a 10-year low, we expect the recent downward trend in offer rejection rates to continue in 2026 as job seekers take what they can get.

With hiring rates at a 10-year low, it is a tough time to be in the labor market. Given the difficulty with landing a new position at the current moment, job seekers are lowering their standards and taking jobs that they otherwise would have rejected. Perhaps the most dramatic expression of an applicant’s choosiness is when they reject a job offer. Securing an interview is hard enough, but getting to the offer stage means the candidate has invested a substantial amount of time and energy into the interview process. Refusing an offer is a show of confidence that something better may come along, and refusal rates dropped dramatically in the latter half of 2025.

Applicants accepted roughly three of four job offers they reported receiving on Glassdoor. The offer decline rate - meaning a candidate received a job offer and refused it - stayed low through the Great Resignation, but peaked in 2023 and early 2024. The annual rate for 2025 has fallen, driven mostly by large drops in job offer decline rates in Q3 and Q4 through September.

This decline rate lags a little bit behind some other measures of labor market mobility, like quits and hires that started declining in 2022 as the refusal rate ticked up. One potential explanation is that workers were ready for change - maybe any change - during the Great Resignation, but became pickier over time, rejecting a higher proportion of offers. In the second half of 2025, decline rates fell to their lowest levels since 2020.

With soft labor market conditions extending into 2026, the job search process is unlikely to improve for candidates. We anticipate that they’ll be more likely to accept any job offer that comes their way, leaving many workers stuck in jobs that are not a great match for them. This risks slowing career and income growth for workers, especially for those early in their career when growth is quickest. These stuck employees will deepen the disengagement crisis already affecting the workforce today.

Real wage growth was down 4.1% for early-career workers from 2020-2022, but will finally surpass 2020 levels next year.

It is difficult to start your career during a soft labor market, but there is a silver lining: earnings growth is on the rise for workers with 0-4 years of experience and 2026 will be the first year that these workers’ purchasing power exceeds 2020 levels.

Inflation hit a 40-year high between 2021 and 2023, and wage growth did not keep pace. Average salaries from early-career workers submitted on Glassdoor rose an average of 4.9% per year from 2020 to 2022, but inflation rose at 6.8% per year. This means real wages were 4.1% lower for early career workers in 2022. Earnings started recovering in 2023, and annualized wage growth has been 4.3% while inflation was 3.0% on average.

The silver lining here is that wage growth has virtually caught up in the past three years, and we anticipate that early-career workers in 2026 will have more spending power than they did in 2020 - but the pay increases have varied across cities.

While the usual suspects have the highest average earnings for young professionals (San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Boston, and Washington D.C.), some unexpected cities have seen major wage growth since 2020, while others have languished. The table below shows the top & bottom cities in terms of growth since 2020.

The top up-and-coming cities for early-career earnings growth are Provo, UT, and Boise, ID. For early career workers considering where to pursue their next career step, these rising cities represent good opportunities to grow your earnings even though they may not offer the highest salaries.

Trend 1: The great employee-leader disconnect

The first two plots show the average rating of senior management by month. The dataset includes only workers who are current, full-time employees, and encompasses 3.3 million reviews from January 2019 through October 31, 2025. The industry split presents annual averages, and includes 760,759 Glassdoor reviews.

The third plot shows the percentage increase in the usage of select terms in Glassdoor reviews that mention senior leadership or management from 2024 to 2025. Only reviews from current full-time or part-time employees in the U.S. were included. 2025 data is year-to-date through October 31, 2025. Mentions were normalized by the total number of reviews during the time period. Different forms of the same term were grouped together. For example, “disconnect” includes but is not limited to “disconnect”, “disconnected”, “disconnection”, “dis-connected”.

Trend 2: The “forever layoff” sets in

The first chart is a presentation of Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS data from 2015 through August 2025, showing the number of dismissals by month with the Spring 2020 spike truncated. The second chart presents WARN Act layoff notifications (aggregated by layoffdata.com) from January 2015 through September 2025, excluding closures and grouped by the number of employees impacted. Since WARN act filings are at the establishment level, it is possible that some filings could be part of the same broader layoff (e.g. one employer laying off 30 employees at one location and 30 at another would show as two layoffs impacting fewer than 50 employees, rather than one layoff impacting 50-249 employees), but inconsistent employer naming in WARN filings presents a challenge for aggregating these events at scale. Resolving this issue is not critical for the result, as a trend of employers laying off a smaller number of employees spread across multiple establishments still represents a move towards more frequent, lower-impact layoffs.

The final chart shows keyword prevalence in 6.2 million U.S.-based Glassdoor reviews from full-time or part-time employees between January 2019 and September 2025. Layoff keywords include terms like layoffs, downsizing, job cuts, furlough, while job insecurity keywords include job security, anxiety, instability, uncertainty, and variants.

Trend 3: The slow-mo RTO will continue

These charts are based on 3.3 million Glassdoor reviews submitted from current employees from January 2020 through October 31, 2025. Predominately non-remote eligible occupations have been excluded from the analysis. We include industry and high-level occupation controls in a regression analysis to normalize any potential changes in the composition of Glassdoor reviews over the time period. Not all reviewers include rating subfactors, so the sample sizes are somewhat reduced from the overall chart: 2.6 million for career opportunity and work-life balance, and 2.5 million for senior management.

Trend 4: AI isn’t bringing employees down quite yet

We analyzed 2.8 million Glassdoor reviews from U.S. full-time or part-time, current or former employees for jobs held in 2022 and 2025 (year-to-date through October 31, 2025). We mapped Glassdoor’s occupational categories to SOC 2018 occupations and then to a measure of occupational exposure to AI produced by researchers at OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania (Eloundou, Manning, Mishkin, Rock 2024). We used the authors’ preferred measure of occupational exposure, the human-rated 𝛃 and identify the 20% of SOC occupations with the highest occupational exposure scores.

In the first plot, we show coefficients from the results of three regressions. The leftmost bar is from a regression of overall Glassdoor rating on year interacted with AI exposure, giving a simple difference in difference estimate of the change in Glassdoor rating from 2022 to 2025 for high exposure occupations vs. all other occupations. The middle bar repeats this approach but for career opportunities ratings. The rightmost bar gives a simple triple difference in difference estimate by interacting year, AI exposure and a flag to indicate whether the worker is early-career or not (defined as 0–4 years of relevant experience). The estimate reported for the rightmost bar is the coefficient of high AI exposure interacted with the 2025 indicator added to the coefficient of high AI exposure interacted with 2025 interacted with the early career indicator.

Trend 5: Job seekers will take what they can get

This chart shows average job offer refusal rates across 173,479 interview reviews left on Glassdoor for interviews that began between January 2020 and September 30, 2025 that resulted in a job offer. The calculation shows the percent of offers rejected by the candidates. We include both annual rates and seasonally-adjusted quarterly rates, since much of the decline in offer rates in 2025 has occurred in Q2 and the first month of Q3, which shows in the quarterly trend but is muted in the annual trend.

Trend 6: Better pay for the new grads who can land a job

The first charts are based on two data sources: 7.0 million salaries submitted on Glassdoor from workers with 0-4 years of relevant experience in their current job from January 2020 through October 31, 2025, and inflation data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of early-career salaries decreases to 5.4 million in the second chart and table when we restrict to metropolitan areas with at least 1,000 salaries per year.