Job Quality in America: What the 2026 American Job Quality Study Reveals
Only 4 in 10 U.S. workers have a quality job. What the 2026 American Job Quality Study reveals, and six dignity-centered ways to improve job quality.
Only 4 in 10 U.S. Jobs Are Quality Jobs. Here's What Employers Can Do About It.
Many leaders believe that retention mostly comes down to pay. Keep wages competitive, and everything else (respect, voice, how a supervisor speaks to people on a hard day) gets filed under "culture." And culture gets treated as soft.
The 2026 American Job Quality Study puts real pressure on that belief. Its strongest predictor of whether employees plan to leave is not the paycheck. It is whether they work in a safe, respectful environment free from discrimination and harassment.
That finding sits at the center of how we work at Workplace Peace Institute. Below, we walk through what the study found and why it matters for small and mid-sized employers. Then we offer six practical ways to build jobs where people can thrive.
What the American Job Quality Study measures
The American Job Quality Study (AJQS) is conducted by Gallup with Jobs for the Future and The Families and Workers Fund. In early 2026, it surveyed 17,874 U.S. workers aged 18 to 75. More than 11,000 of them also took part in 2025, so the study can follow the same people over a full year.
The study defines a quality job as one that meets minimum standards across five dimensions:
Financial Well-Being: fair pay, stable employment, and benefits that meet basic needs.
Workplace Culture and Safety: a safe, respectful environment free from discrimination or harassment.
Growth and Development Opportunities: a clear path to build skills and advance.
Agency and Voice: influence over decisions that shape one's job, including pay, working conditions, and new technology.
Work Structure and Autonomy: a predictable schedule, a manageable workload, and control over how work gets done.
For the second year in a row, only about four in 10 workers have a quality job: 41 percent of all workers and 40 percent of employees. Neither number moved from 2025. In the report's words, quality jobs "remain the exception rather than the norm in America."
No single dimension pulls the number down on its own. Fewer than half of employees clear the bar on three of the five, and work structure stands out: only 15 percent of employees have the predictable schedules, manageable workloads, and real control that the study counts as quality.
Five findings about job quality employers should take seriously
1. Respect predicts retention more strongly than pay
Employees in non-quality jobs are 3.4 times more likely to plan to leave in the next year. The researchers also tested each dimension separately. Workplace Culture and Safety had the strongest link to intent to leave (3.1 times the odds). Next came Growth and Development (2.5x), Financial Well-Being (2.0x) and Agency and Voice (1.6x). Those links held after the researchers controlled for age, education, race, ethnicity, and gender.
The plainest version: among employees who strongly disagree that they are treated with respect at work, 32 percent say they are very likely to leave. Among those who strongly agree, it is 9 percent.
This is not an argument that pay doesn't matter. Nearly one in three employees (31 percent) say they are just getting by or finding it difficult to get by, and financial security is part of dignity. But the data make it clear that a raise won't keep people in a workplace where they feel disrespected.
2. Culture lives, or breaks, in the manager relationship
One in four employees (25 percent) report discrimination or unfair treatment at work, and 22 percent report being bullied, threatened, or harassed. Who the mistreatment comes from matters. Among employees mistreated by a supervisor, 27 percent are very likely to leave. The figure is 21 percent when the source is a coworker and 19 percent when it is a customer.
Customers are the most common source of bullying or harassment: 13 percent of employees report it, compared with 9 percent for coworkers and 7 percent for supervisors. For customer-facing teams, protecting staff from mistreatment is part of a manager's job, not an extra.
3. Quality jobs are unevenly shared
Fifty-two percent of managers and leaders have quality jobs, compared with 36 percent of individual contributors. Only 32 percent of Gen Z employees do. Among college graduates, 56 percent of men have quality jobs, compared with 43 percent of women.
The manager advantage isn't shared equally either. Forty-seven percent of managers of color have quality jobs, compared with 54 percent of White managers. The widest gap is in Workplace Culture and Safety (36 percent vs. 47 percent). Managers of color are also less likely to strongly agree that they feel a sense of belonging (34 percent vs. 43 percent).
Groups with lower quality-job rates also report the most mistreatment. That includes 48 percent of LGBTQ+ employees, 52 percent of Middle Eastern or North African employees, and 59 percent of neurodivergent employees. An organization's average can look fine while whole groups of people experience a very different workplace. Dignity that some people receive, and others don't, is rooted in a patriarchal hierarchy of human value.
4. Job quality shows up in health and on the balance sheet
Because the study followed the same people for a year, it can show who actually left. Employees in non-quality jobs in 2025 were nearly twice as likely to work for a different employer a year later (15 percent vs. 8 percent). Gallup separately estimates that replacing an employee costs about 40 percent of salary for frontline roles, about 80 percent for technical professionals and about 200 percent for managers and leaders.
Health follows the same pattern. Fifty-one percent of employees in quality jobs rate their health as excellent or very good, compared with 35 percent of those in non-quality jobs. They are estimated to miss about four workdays a year to illness or injury, compared with five. Their estimated annual private-insurance healthcare costs are about $5,200, compared with $6,200, roughly 16 percent lower. The researchers are careful to call these associations, not proof of cause. Still, the direction is consistent across every outcome they measured.
5. AI is arriving through the same doors
Twenty-eight percent of employees use AI at work at least weekly. Fifty-two percent of those regular users have quality jobs, compared with 32 percent of employees who never use it. Part of the reason is that AI use is concentrated among managers and college graduates, who already tend to have better jobs.
AI is also changing expectations. Thirty-one percent of AI users say their employer has asked them to take on more responsibilities since they started using it. And 55 percent of employees say they have less influence than they would like over how new technology is used at work.
The global picture: managers are carrying more with less
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report adds important context. Global employee engagement fell for the second year in a row, to 20 percent. Gallup estimates that low engagement cost the world economy about $10 trillion in lost productivity last year.
Most of that decline came from managers. Global manager engagement dropped from 27 percent to 22 percent in a single year. In the U.S. and Canada region, 31 percent of employees are engaged, and half (50 percent) report feeling a lot of stress during the previous day. Leaders are more likely than individual contributors to report daily stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness.
The same report finds that managers are the deciding factor in whether AI helps. Employees whose manager actively supports their team's use of AI are 8.7 times as likely to strongly agree that AI has transformed how work gets done. Yet fewer than a third of U.S. employees in organizations adopting AI say their manager provides that support.
Read together, the two studies point to one place. The manager relationship is where job quality is won or lost, and many managers are running on empty. Asking them to hold culture, safety, voice, and technology change with no support is a systems design problem, not a personal failing.
Job quality is a dignity question
At Workplace Peace Institute, we define peace as human security and the ability to experience our inherent worth and value as human beings. Read the five AJQS dimensions through that lens, and they sort into two groups:
Human security: Financial Well-Being and Work Structure and Autonomy. Enough pay to live on, a schedule you can plan around, and a workload that doesn't consume you.
Inherent worth: Workplace Culture and Safety, Agency and Voice, and Growth and Development. Being treated with respect, having a real say, and being seen as someone worth investing in.
Seen this way, the AJQS is a national measure of whether work honors human dignity. Six in 10 jobs fall short. Results this consistent are not the work of a few bad managers. It reflects how the organizational system is designed. Systems consistently produce the outcomes they are designed to produce.
That is why we approach culture as organizational systems design. Every organization operates from an often-unnoticed paradigm that shapes its policies, processes, and everyday conversations. Improving job quality means examining that paradigm, not just adding another program on top of it.
Six ways employers can improve job quality
1. Measure job quality, and look beneath the average
Most engagement surveys produce a score. Few explain it. A culture audit combines survey data with interviews and observation, then breaks results down by role and by group. That turns the gaps the AJQS found nationally into gaps you can see locally. The five AJQS dimensions are a useful public benchmark for deciding what to measure.
2. Make respect a leadership skill, not a personality trait
Supervisor mistreatment carries the highest turnover risk of any source, so manager development is the highest-leverage investment most employers can make. Leaders need practice honoring dignity in ordinary moments: giving feedback, making decisions, handling conflict. Shared frameworks, such as the WPI basic human needs framework, give a leadership team a common language. Pair training with coaching so it changes behavior, not just awareness. Also attend to managers' own well-being, since they carry much of the emotional load.
3. Build voice into decisions, including decisions about technology
Voice does not mean every decision is made by consensus. It means being clear about how each decision will be made (unilateral, consultative, consent-based, or consensus) and inviting input where it can genuinely shape the outcome. With 55 percent of employees wanting more say over new technology, AI is a good place to start. Ask the people who will use a tool before you roll it out. When AI makes work faster, decide together what happens with that time rather than quietly raising the bar.
4. Address mistreatment early, and in ways that repair harm
People need clear ways to raise concerns and a prompt, fair response when they do. Mediation, facilitated dialogue, and restorative justice let people be heard and rebuild working relationships, rather than only assigning blame. Set clear conduct standards for customers and back your staff when those standards are crossed. In high-exposure fields such as healthcare and protective services, trauma-informed leadership helps managers respond to distress without making it worse. A fractional ombudsman provides an independent, trusted resource.
5. Treat predictability and financial security as dignity issues
Only 15 percent of employees meet the study's standard for work structure and autonomy. Practical steps make a difference here. Post schedules early and limit last-minute changes. Give people real input into their shifts and right-size workloads. Be transparent about pay and how it is set. For hourly workers and Gen Z employees, who report the most financial strain, these changes can matter as much as a raise.
6. Close the gaps on purpose
Look at your data by group, not just in total. Where is culture and safety lagging? Who has access to training? Do individual contributors have growth paths, or only managers? Invite people to share their experiences, never require it, and make it safe to speak.
The bottom line
Unemployment numbers tell us whether people have jobs. The AJQS asks whether those jobs let people live securely, grow, and be treated with respect. Right now, most don't.
The study's authors conclude that schedule stability, employee voice, and access to training aren't "soft" HR concerns; they are tied to retention, health, and cost. We would add one thing. They are questions of dignity, and organizations can design dignity into how they work.
Where does your organization stand? Workplace Peace Institute's culture audits show you how your people experience respect, voice, growth, security, and predictability at work, and where those experiences differ across your teams. From there, we help you build a practical roadmap and develop the leaders who carry it. Schedule a consultation to start the conversation.
About Workplace Peace Institute: Workplace Peace Institute is an organizational systems design and research firm based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. We help small and mid-sized organizations create life-affirming workplace cultures grounded in human security and dignity, through culture development, leadership development, professional coaching, and conflict intervention. Learn more at workplacepeaceinstitute.com.
