A Shikigaku survey of 1,000 Japanese employees who had changed jobs in the previous three years found that 59.7% reported regret or a sense of failure after joining their new employer — most often because the salary was lower than expected, or because the new organisation’s culture did not fit. On the other side, a VALUE WORKS survey of 301 working adults who had considered a job change but stayed found that only 25% regret not having changed — the other 75% said they do not regret staying, although half of that group report they are still reconsidering a move. Taken together, the surveys point to more regret from changing jobs than from staying. The Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training (JILPT) 2022 analysis adds context but no direct regret rate: it finds mid-career job-changers report higher work engagement and self-evaluated performance than long-time employees, and that holding a professional qualification or licence correlates with better wages after a change — a plausible driver of the minority who regret not having moved.
The pattern here is inaction-dominates — regret runs higher among those who took the action (changed jobs) than among those who stayed, which is the modal configuration in Gilovich and Medvec’s temporal regret model only in the short term; over long horizons their model expects inaction regret to grow. The two figures are not strictly comparable: they come from different surveys, different years, and different populations, and Japanese job-change-regret polls vary widely (other surveys report closer to one-in-four job-changer regret, well below Shikigaku’s 59.7%). What is consistent is that a clear majority of stayers do not regret staying, while a majority of recent changers express at least some regret — frequently driven by pay that fell short of expectations rather than by a wholesale rejection of the move.
Both rates carry framing caveats: the surveys were run by recruiting-adjacent organisations, and the stayer “no regret” figure sits uneasily beside the finding that half of those same workers are still weighing a change. An earlier version of this entry attributed both rates to a single En Japan survey; that survey, per Nippon.com coverage, actually measured how overtime affects which company people pick when changing jobs and reported no regret data at all, so its figures have been replaced with the two direct-regret surveys above. The framing also assumes genuine access to lifetime employment, which is shrinking: Japan’s share of non-regular workers rose from 15% in 1984 to roughly 37% in 2023, so for a growing fraction of the workforce the choice this entry describes is no longer available.