Toxic Workplace Statistics (2026)

Nineteen percent of US workers describe their workplace as very or somewhat toxic, according to the American Psychological Association's 2023 Work in America survey of 2,515 employed adults. In the 2026 edition, 37% said their work environment negatively affects their mental health, up from 32% a year earlier. Harassment charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rose from 21,270 in 2021 to 37,397 in 2025, and retaliation now appears in six of every ten charges.

The pages that rank for this question are built on vendor polls of job seekers that produce figures of 70% or 80%, a cost estimate from 2019 with no published method, and a claim that toxic culture makes employees "ten times more likely to quit" that misreads the study. This page uses the APA's Harris Poll surveys, MIT Sloan's analysis of 1.3 million employee reviews, the Workplace Bullying Institute, SHRM's Civility Index, EEOC charge data and the peer-reviewed cost literature, with the sample and date next to each figure.

How many workers say their workplace is toxic

The American Psychological Association's Work in America survey, run by the Harris Poll on about 2,000 to 2,500 employed adults each spring, is the only probability-based series. The 2023 edition found 19% describing their workplace as very or somewhat toxic and 22% saying work had harmed their mental health. The 2024 edition found the toxic share was 30% among workers with low psychological safety and 3% among those with high psychological safety. The 2026 edition, from 2,009 workers surveyed in May and June 2026, found 37% saying their work environment negatively affects their mental health, up from 32% in 2025, and 80% describing their workplace as healthy, down from 85%.

The iHire and Monster figures that dominate search results, 69% and 80%, are polls of job seekers or online panels asking whether respondents have ever worked somewhere toxic. They measure a different thing from the APA's question about the current workplace, and they should not be placed on the same line.

What toxic means: the five attributes

MIT Sloan Management Review's 2022 analysis by Donald and Charles Sull of 1.3 million Glassdoor reviews by US employees of large companies identified the five attributes that most lower a company's culture rating: disrespectful, non-inclusive, unethical, cutthroat and abusive. Disrespect lowered the culture rating by 0.66 points on a five-point scale and non-inclusion by a similar amount; abusive management added a further 0.50. Only 0.8% of reviews described a manager as abusive and 1% described the culture as cutthroat, which is to say that the loud forms of toxicity are rare and the quiet ones, disrespect and exclusion, do most of the damage. The authors' rule of thumb is that when one in four employees mentions toxicity, the culture as a whole is toxic.

Bullying, harassment and retaliation

The Workplace Bullying Institute's 2021 national survey, run by Zogby Analytics on 1,215 US adults, found 30% had directly experienced abusive conduct at work and another 19% had witnessed it, so 49% were affected. Among the employed, 39% had been bullied. The institute extrapolated that to 48.6 million bullied workers and 79.3 million affected. Sixty-five percent of bullies were bosses and 67% were men; women bullies targeted women 65% of the time. Among those bullied, 23% quit, against 3% of perpetrators who left, and the share of perpetrators facing any negative consequence was 23%, up from 2% in 2003.

Administrative data show the trend. EEOC charge receipts alleging harassment rose from 21,270 in fiscal 2021 to 35,774 in 2024 and 37,397 in 2025, a 76% rise in four years, with $261.9 million in pre-litigation monetary benefits in 2025. Of 88,201 total charges in 2025, 54,350 included a retaliation basis, about 62%, up from 48% the year before. Retaliation has been the most common charge basis since 2010. The APA's 2023 survey adds the self-report side: 22% had experienced harassment at work in the previous year, up from 14% in 2022, with verbal abuse reported by 31% of customer-facing workers and physical violence by 12% of manual labourers.

Incivility, measured quarterly

SHRM's Civility Index is the one measure of low-grade toxicity with a repeated method. In the third quarter of 2025, from 1,478 US workers surveyed in July, workers experienced or witnessed 0.42 acts of incivility per day at work, which SHRM scales to about 70.6 million acts a day across US workplaces. The workplace score was 39.0 out of 100, against 40.9 in the fourth quarter of 2024, and the society score 48.5. Fifty-one percent of those who experienced incivility said at least one act happened at work, 35% said their manager ignored it and 44% said the manager could have done more. In the fourth quarter of 2024, 76% of 1,622 workers had experienced or witnessed incivility in the past month, 56% named political viewpoint differences as a top contributor, and 26% said they were likely to leave their job because of it. Porath and Pearson's long-running polling, summarized in Harvard Business Review in 2013, found 98% of workers had experienced uncivil behavior and that the share treated rudely at least weekly rose from a quarter in 1998 to half in 2011.

Toxic culture and who leaves

The most-cited finding on this topic is from MIT Sloan Management Review's January 2022 analysis of attrition at 538 large US companies between April and September 2021, using 34 million employee profiles and 1.4 million reviews. Toxic corporate culture was 10.4 times more predictive of a company's attrition rate, relative to its industry, than compensation, which ranked sixteenth of 172 factors. The next predictors were job insecurity and reorganization, high innovation, failure to recognize performance and a poor pandemic response. The finding is about which company-level factors predict attrition, not about an individual being ten times more likely to quit.

Among individuals, Porath and Pearson's 800-person poll found 12% of those who experienced incivility left their job because of it, 48% intentionally decreased their effort, 47% cut their time at work and 78% said their commitment declined. SHRM's 2019 omnibus survey of 1,014 adults found nearly one in five had left a job because of culture, 58% of them citing their manager, and 76% saying their manager sets the culture. Gallup's 2015 study of 7,272 adults found one in two had left a job at some point to get away from a manager. Mind Share Partners' 2021 survey of 1,500 full-time workers found 50% had left a previous role at least partly for mental health reasons, rising to 68% of millennials and 81% of Gen Z. Our employee turnover statistics page sets these against the national quits data, and our micromanagement statistics page covers the manager behaviors most often named.

What it does to health

In the APA's 2023 data, workers in toxic workplaces were more than three times as likely to report harm to their mental health at work, 52% against 15%. Mind Share Partners found 76% of full-time workers reported at least one mental health symptom in the past year, up from 59% in 2019, with burnout at 56%, depression at 46% and anxiety at 40%, and 84% said at least one workplace factor had hurt their mental health. The CDC's health worker series found employees who reported harassment had 5.83 times the odds of anxiety. The Stanford and Harvard model by Goh, Pfeffer and Zenios attributes about 120,000 US deaths a year and up to $190 billion in health spending to workplace stressors including job insecurity and long hours. Our workplace stress statistics page covers that evidence in detail.

What it costs, and which estimates hold up

The figure that circulates most is SHRM's $223 billion. It appeared in SHRM's September 2019 release as the cost of turnover due to culture "over the past five years," so roughly $45 billion a year for 2014 to 2019, and SHRM never published the calculation. SHRM's current cost model is narrower and documented: the third-quarter 2025 Civility Index puts the daily cost of incivility at about $2.14 billion in lost productivity and absenteeism, built from 35.3 minutes lost per uncivil act, a $32.02 average hourly wage, 70.6 million acts a day and 1.7 days a month avoided by affected workers. The fourth-quarter 2024 equivalent was $2.71 billion a day. MIT Sloan's article cites replacement costs of up to twice annual salary and an incremental $16 billion in health care costs from toxic workplaces in 2008. Our employee cost calculator lets you apply turnover and absence rates to your own payroll.

What employers do about it

Mostly nothing, by employees' account. In SHRM's 2025 data, 35% of workers who experienced incivility said their manager ignored it. In iHire's 2026 poll of 1,220 job seekers, 38.8% of those who witnessed toxic behavior never reported it, 45% of them because they doubted HR or leadership would act, and 51.4% of those who did report said nothing was addressed. In the Workplace Bullying Institute's data, 23% of perpetrators faced any consequence. On the positive side, the APA's 2023 survey found 77% satisfied with their employer's mental health support and 92% saying it is important to work for an organization that values psychological wellbeing, and SHRM's data show employees who rate their team as civil are significantly more likely to feel safe speaking up. The levers the evidence points to are the manager and psychological safety, which is where the 30% against 3% split in the APA's 2024 data comes from.

Figures to stop using

• "Toxic workplaces cost $223 billion a year." SHRM's figure was cumulative over five years to 2019, with no published method.
• "Toxic culture makes employees 10 times more likely to quit." MIT found toxic culture 10.4 times more predictive of company attrition than pay. It is not an individual odds ratio.
• "80% of workers are in a toxic workplace." Monster's 2025 online poll of about 1,100 people. The APA's probability sample says 19%.
• "Nearly 7 in 10 have a toxic workplace." iHire's job seekers who have ever worked somewhere toxic.
• "1 in 5 left a job because of culture" presented as current is SHRM's July 2019 omnibus.
• WBI's "19% bullied" is the 2017 survey. The 2021 figure is 30%.
• "Gallup says toxic culture costs $1 trillion." Gallup's figure is for voluntary turnover generally.

Key takeaways

• 19% of US workers describe their workplace as very or somewhat toxic, per the APA's 2023 survey of 2,515. In 2026, 37% said work negatively affects their mental health, up from 32%.
• Workers with low psychological safety call their workplace toxic at 30%; those with high psychological safety at 3%.
• The five toxic attributes in 1.3 million reviews are disrespectful, non-inclusive, unethical, cutthroat and abusive. Disrespect and exclusion do most of the damage.
• 30% of US adults have been bullied at work and 49% affected; 65% of bullies are bosses. EEOC harassment charges rose 76% between 2021 and 2025, and 62% of charges now include retaliation.
• Toxic culture was 10.4 times more predictive of company attrition than compensation across 538 large US companies in 2021.
• Workers in toxic workplaces are three times as likely to report mental health harm, 52% against 15%.
• SHRM's $223 billion was a five-year total to 2019 with no published method. Its current model puts incivility at about $2.1 billion a day in lost productivity and absenteeism.
• 35% of workers who experienced incivility say their manager ignored it, and 23% of bullies face any consequence.