A 2024–2025 Resume Genius survey of 1,000 US workers found that 27% didn’t negotiate and now wish they had — the cleanest inaction-regret group in its four-part breakdown. (A widely cited 57% headline figure covers “some regret about how they approached” negotiation, but it bundles the 30% who regret their approach yet felt it was right at the time, many of whom did negotiate, so it overstates pure inaction regret.) On the action side there is no direct regret survey: among those who negotiated, 78% say they ended up with a better offer and 22% did not, so the 0.22 action rate is a proxy upper bound, not a measured regret figure. The remaining tilt toward inaction is modest but directionally consistent with Gilovich and Medvec’s inaction-dominance pattern. Separately, a Fidelity Investments study of 1,524 workers found that 85% of those who counteroffered got at least some of what they asked for, suggesting the fear of negotiating is disproportionate to the actual downside risk.
The generational breakdown complicates any simple “youth regret inaction more” reading. Pew Research found that most US workers accepted their initial offer without any negotiation attempt — only 32% of men and 28% of women said they asked for higher pay. Resume Genius, meanwhile, found that younger workers negotiate more, not less: 55% of Gen Z counter an offer versus 42% of Baby Boomers. Negotiating more often, though, does not automatically mean regretting less about how the conversation went: the same survey’s approach-regret category — the 30% who regret their approach but felt it was right at the time — is, by construction, drawn from people who did negotiate. That is not the same as the clean inaction regret this entry measures; it is exactly the kind of handling-regret the 27% figure deliberately excludes.
The main caveat is measurement asymmetry. The inaction figure is restricted to the clean 27% who “didn’t negotiate and now wish they had,” rather than the headline 57% that mixes in approach-regret from people who did negotiate. The action rate has no direct survey behind it at all — it is proxied by the 22% of negotiators who did not end up with a better offer, which is an upper bound, since not getting more is not the same as regretting the attempt. The Fidelity study’s 85% “success” rate counts any partial win, which may still have left the negotiator feeling undercompensated. The direction holds, but with the inaction figure restricted to the clean group the gap is modest and the rates should be read as approximate.