About 58% of workers say that staying at a job too long is one of their biggest career regrets, according to Resume Now’s 2024 survey of 1,000 workers across four countries. By contrast, 38% regret quitting a job — the survey’s closest reported analogue to regretting a career change. The gap runs about three-to-two in favor of the inaction regret, placing career inertia among the more lopsided regret asymmetries in the survey literature.
The finding aligns cleanly with Gilovich and Medvec’s temporal model: inaction regrets dominate over time. A bad career move generates sharp short-term regret (the “what have I done” phase), but this fades as people adapt to new roles. Staying too long, by contrast, compounds — each passing year adds another counterfactual (“I could have left three years ago”). The Resume Now data confirms this age gradient: mid-career workers report the highest regret rates (70% of millennials, 69% of Gen X), while baby boomers — who have had decades to either act or rationalize — report 52%.
The caveat that matters is self-selection. People who change careers are not a random draw from the working population. They tend to be more risk-tolerant, more dissatisfied with the status quo, and more likely to have a concrete alternative in mind. The 38% quit-regret rate reflects this filtered population, not what would happen if a random office worker were reassigned to a new field. The 58% staying-too-long figure is also broader than it appears: it includes people who eventually did leave but wish they had done so sooner, not just lifelong stayers.