Resume Now’s 2025 survey of 1,000 workers across four countries found that 58% named “staying in a bad job too long” as their biggest career regret — outranking not asking for a promotion, not speaking up, and not pursuing further education. Only 38% said quitting was their top regret. Bankrate’s 2025 Jobs & Pay Report independently corroborates the underlying dissatisfaction: 48% of workers are likely to look for a new job in the next 12 months (down from 56% in 2023, as “job hugging” takes hold in a weaker market), while 69% worry about their job security and pay raises have fallen to a multi-year low. The convergence from two independent sources strengthens the inaction-regret signal.
On the action side, Joblist surveyed over 15,000 US job seekers and found that 26% of those who quit their previous job regretted the decision. This is substantially lower than the widely cited Paychex figure of 80%, which specifically targeted Great Resignation quitters surveyed in October 2022 — a historically anomalous cohort driven by pandemic restlessness and social contagion. The Joblist sample, drawn from a broader population over a longer window, better represents normal-conditions quitting regret.
The revised framing resolves the earlier contradiction. Under normal labor conditions, quitting regret runs around 25-30% (Joblist), not 80% (Paychex). The 80% was an artifact of a specific, unusual period where many people quit impulsively into a market that cooled faster than expected. Over time, per Gilovich’s temporal pattern, quitting regret fades (the new job improves, or you quit again) while staying regret compounds (another year passes, the resume stagnates). The steady-state pattern is inaction-dominates, consistent with the broader career-regret literature.