A 2024 Resume-Now survey of 1,000 workers across the US, UK, France, and Germany found that 60% named not asking for a pay raise as their top career regret, the single highest-frequency item in the survey. On the action side, a separate Fidelity Investments study of 1,524 US workers found that 85% of those who counteroffered got at least some of what they asked for. The resulting action-regret rate is estimated at around 20% — an upper bound derived from the Fidelity success rate and the absence of any direct “do you regret asking?” measure, rather than a directly measured figure.
Pew Research Center’s 2023 nationally representative survey (5,188 employed US workers) found that most workers did not ask for higher pay than what was initially offered when last hired: only about 30% said they did ask (32% of men, 28% of women). That large non-negotiating majority is directionally consistent with the Resume-Now regret finding, suggesting that the population that never asked overlaps heavily with the population that later wishes it had. Alongside the 60% who regret not asking for a pay increase, 51% of Resume-Now respondents regret not asking for a promotion and 58% regret not negotiating salary when taking a job, so missed-compensation regrets cluster near the top of the list. This pattern is consistent with Gilovich’s temporal model, where counterfactuals about paths not taken solidify and become harder to dismiss as careers progress.
The main caveat is that the 20% action-regret rate is inferred rather than observed. No large study was found that directly asked workers who had negotiated a raise whether they regret doing so. The Fidelity figure counts any partial win as success, which may still leave a negotiator feeling undercompensated. Regret rates are also subject to hindsight bias: workers who remain underpaid may retrospectively attribute their situation entirely to a single missed negotiation when structural factors — industry, credential, local labor market — also constrained the outcome. Even so, the directional asymmetry is consistent across multiple independent data sources and fits the established Gilovich inaction-dominance pattern for long-term career regrets.