Workplace Wellbeing Statistics (2026)
Employee wellbeing gets plenty of attention in 2026. It shows up in company values, benefits packages, and leadership messaging across almost every industry. But what gets less attention is whether any of that support actually reaches the people who need it.
To find out, Founder Reports surveyed 2,000 US-based working adults. We asked how often work affects their wellbeing, who they can be honest with when they’re struggling, whether they’ve used their employer’s mental health resources, whether they’ve turned to an AI chatbot instead, and what specific things they’ve done in the past year to hide what they were going through.
With this data, we can look at a single worker in distress and see every channel available to them, which ones they used, and which ones they ignored. What we found is that most workers hide or conceal their problems, formal support goes mostly unused, and workers increasingly turn to AI before they’ll go to anyone at their own company.
Download the full 2026 Workplace Wellbeing Report
Key Workplace Wellbeing Statistics
- 75.2% of workers did at least one thing to hide work-related distress in the past year. Only 10.8% told a manager or HR representative.
- 38.8% of workers called in sick in the past year and gave a reason other than the real one.
- 42.6% of workers have used an AI chatbot to talk through work stress, compared to 10.7% who have ever used their employer’s mental health support.
- 62.4% of workers say work affects their wellbeing at least monthly, and 47.4% say it happens weekly or daily.
- Only 17.2% of workers say they could be completely honest with their manager about work hurting their wellbeing.
- Women report higher strain than men, with 50.0% affected weekly or daily compared to 43.7% of men.
- As work stress rises, comfort with a manager falls from 26.6% to 12.3% while comfort with an AI chatbot rises from 9.2% to 28.9%.
- 38.8% of workers say their employer offers no mental health support, and another 11.2% aren’t sure whether support exists.
- Benefit usage stays flat as stress rises (21.8% to 23.0%), while AI use climbs from 38.3% to 52.9% over the same range.
[Download the full report to access every data point, chart, and demographic breakdown.]
How Often Work Affects Wellbeing
We asked workers how often their job has affected their wellbeing over the past year, naming the specific experiences people recognize rather than asking about “mental health” in general.
62.4% of workers say work affects their wellbeing at least monthly. Nearly half, 47.4%, say it happens weekly or daily. Only 5.4% say work never impacts their wellbeing at all.
Employment type barely makes a difference here. 46.7% of full-time workers and 49.2% of part-time workers fall into the weekly-or-daily range.
50.0% of women report work affecting their wellbeing weekly or daily, compared to 43.7% of men. And as you’ll see later, that’s just one of several stats showing that women are more significantly impacted than men.
📖 Definition: Weekly or daily strain
Throughout this report, “weekly or daily strain” refers to workers who said their job affected their wellbeing either several times a week or every day over the past year. This group represents 47.4% of the full sample.
How Many Workers Hide Stress From Their Employer
Much of the existing research on workplace mental health stigma is attitudinal, measuring whether people feel pressure to mask what they’re going through. We asked respondents what they actually did.
75.2% of workers did at least one thing to conceal work-related distress in the past year, while only 10.8% told a manager or HR representative what was going on.
The most common concealment behavior, and the one with the clearest cost attached to it, is the fake sick day. 38.8% of workers called in sick in the past year and gave a reason other than the real one. Among those with daily work stress, 52.3% have done this.
Among workers affected daily by stress, 88.3% concealed something, and 26.9% did three or more concealment behaviors.
🎯 Why It Matters
The fake sick day is a wellbeing statistic that can have a dollar figure attached to it. Every one of those absences is a scheduling disruption, a coverage scramble, and a productivity loss. When more than half of your most-stressed employees are calling out under false pretenses, absenteeism data alone will never tell you what’s actually happening.
A subset of workers is dealing with stress completely alone. Among the 949 respondents affected weekly or daily, 76.7% have neither used an employer benefit nor have anyone inside their company they could be honest with.
Who Workers Can Actually Be Honest With
We asked workers who they could be completely honest with if work was hurting their wellbeing, and let them select as many options as applied.
Friends and family dominate at 83.0%. Inside the workplace, the numbers drop sharply. Only 17.2% could be honest with their manager, 4.5% with HR, and 3.5% with company leadership.
An AI chatbot outranks every formal channel at work. 20.9% of workers said they could be honest with an AI chatbot.
30.0% named friends or family as their only option, and 4.5% said they could be honest with nobody at all. Roughly a third of the American workforce is carrying work stress with very little support around them.
The way workers reach outside the company differs by sex. Women lean toward therapists and personal relationships. Men are more likely to trust HR, and also more likely to report having nobody at all to be honest with.
The Trust Crossover: Managers vs. AI Chatbots
The most striking finding in the study is what happens when stress frequency increases.
📖 Definition: The Trust Crossover
The trust crossover is the point at which workers become more comfortable being honest with an AI chatbot than with their own manager. It happens as work stress increases. Comfort with a manager declines while comfort with a chatbot rises, and the two lines cross somewhere between monthly and weekly strain.
Among workers who say their job never hurts their wellbeing, 26.6% can be completely honest with their manager and 9.2% trust an AI chatbot. Among workers affected by stress daily, those numbers flip. Comfort with a manager drops to 12.3% while comfort with AI rises to 28.9%.
Put simply, workers who say the job never hurts them choose their manager over a chatbot by nearly 3-to-1. Workers dealing with daily strain choose the chatbot over their manager by more than 2-to-1. Manager comfort falls by more than half exactly as the need for that conversation rises.
The workers who most need to talk to a manager are the least comfortable doing it. This inverts the usual assumption that support is there for people when things get bad. Comfort erodes precisely as stress climbs, which means the channel companies most rely on is weakest at the moment it’s needed most.
The collapse isn’t limited to managers. Trust in HR and company leaders also drops.
Outside the company, the pattern reverses. Comfort with a therapist climbs from 14.7% among unaffected workers to 30.5% among those with daily strain.
Are Employees Using Their Mental Health Benefits?
The short answer is, mostly no.
39.3% of workers say their employer offers mental health support, but they’ve never used it. Another 38.8% say their employer offers nothing, and 11.2% aren’t sure. Only 10.6% have ever used what’s available. Half the workforce is either unserved or uninformed.
Among workers who do have formal support available, only 21.3% have actually used it. The more revealing number is what happens to that figure as need increases. It barely changes. Someone mildly affected a few times a year uses the benefit at 21.8%. Someone in daily distress uses it at 23.0%.
Compare that to AI over the same range, where usage climbs from 38.3% to 52.9%. Regular and frequent AI use triples between the mildly affected and the daily affected while employer benefit usage stays virtually the same.
There’s another problem underneath all of this. Benefit availability is actually worse for those who need it most. 46.4% of workers affected by stress daily say their employer offers nothing, compared to 32.5% of workers affected a few times a year. The people under the most pressure are the least likely to have anything available, and no more likely to use it when they do.
AI for Mental Health and Work Stress
42.6% of workers have used an AI chatbot to talk through work stress or frustration (12.0% do it regularly). Another 19.7% haven’t done it but have considered it, which means 62.3% of the workforce either uses AI this way or is thinking about it.
42.6% have talked to a chatbot about work stress. 10.8% have told a manager or HR what they were going through. Nearly four times as many workers turn to a bot rather than a person at their own company.
📈 Trend Watch
AI is becoming the workplace confidant of first resort, especially for workers under heavy strain and for those in leadership roles. This is a new channel that has only existed for a few years, and it now outranks every formal internal support option in our data.
AI use rises with strain, rises with seniority, and falls with tenure. In the regression, each step up the strain scale raises the odds of AI use by about 24%. Being in a leadership role raises them by about 81%. Being comfortable talking to a manager lowers them by about 29%.
Workers who have a manager they can be honest with are significantly less likely to be talking to a chatbot about work.
It would be easy to read all this as workers swapping human support for a machine, but the data says otherwise. Workers comfortable confiding in AI are substantially more likely to also trust a therapist (42.8% vs. 23.5%) and more likely to have used their employer’s benefit (14.4% vs. 7.8%). Only 2.1% of the sample trusts an AI chatbot without trusting a single human being.
The people using AI for work stress are the most help-seeking people in the sample. They reach for more support of every kind, with one exception. They’re less likely than average to trust their own manager.
Workplace Wellbeing Statistics for Women
Women don’t just report more stress in this study. They carry a heavier load across nearly every measure of strain and concealment, even as their relationship with AI looks identical to men’s.
Start with frequency. 50.0% of women say work affects their wellbeing weekly or daily, compared to 43.7% of men. Women are more likely to be living with work stress as a constant rather than an occasional disruption.
That higher strain also impacts behavior. 41.0% of women have called in sick with a fake reason in the past year, compared to 35.6% of men.
Where the two groups converge is AI. 43.0% of women and 42.1% of men have used a chatbot for work stress, and 20.9% of both would be comfortable being honest with one.
The two groups diverge again in where they turn otherwise. Women lean outward, toward therapists and personal relationships. Men are more likely to trust HR, and more likely to report having no one at all to be honest with.
Workplace Wellbeing by Role, Age, and Tenure
Seniority doesn’t buy openness. 76.7% of managers and above have done something in the past year to hide work stress compared to 76.0% among individual contributors. However, managers and leaders are more likely to reach for AI, at 50.2% versus 39.3% for individual contributors.
The most isolated group in the study is the C-suite. 12.9% say there’s no one at all they can be honest with, roughly triple the overall rate, and 61.3% report weekly or daily strain, the highest of any role group.
Age also matters. Concealment falls steadily as workers get older. 82.6% of workers aged 18 to 24 concealed work-related distress in the past year, compared to 57.0% of workers 55 and older. The youngest workers are also the least equipped, with only 38.5% having a mental health benefit available, the lowest of any age group.
Tenure adds one more wrinkle. Workers in their first year are the most exposed, with only 28.9% having a benefit available and just 3.9% having used one. Workers with more than 20 years in their role are the outlier in the other direction, with the lowest AI use, the lowest concealment, and the lowest fake sick day rate in the dataset.
Where This Leaves Employers
The data points in one direction. The support systems companies build are used at roughly the same rate whether a worker is mildly stressed or falling apart, while the channels employees actually reach for scale directly with how bad things get. Any organization serious about wellbeing in 2026 should watch the share of its people who have someone internal they can be honest with, and the share quietly reaching for AI because they don’t.
Download the full 2026 Workplace Wellbeing Report for complete methodology, regression results, and every demographic breakdown from the survey.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often does work affect employee wellbeing?
Work affects the wellbeing of 62.4% of workers at least monthly, according to the 2026 Workplace Wellbeing Report. Nearly half, 47.4%, say it happens weekly or daily, and only 5.4% say work never affects their wellbeing.
How many workers hide stress from their employer?
75.2% of workers did at least one thing to conceal work-related distress in the past year, and only 10.8% told a manager or HR representative. The most common concealment behavior is calling in sick with a fake reason, reported by 38.8% of all workers.
Do employees use their employer’s mental health benefits?
Most employees are not using their mental health benefits. Only 10.6% of workers have ever used the support their employer offers, and among those who have a benefit available, utilization sits at just 21.3%. That rate stays nearly flat regardless of how much stress a worker is under.
How many workers use AI for work stress?
42.6% of workers have used an AI chatbot to talk through work stress or frustration, and 12.0% do it regularly. That’s nearly four times the share who have told a manager or HR what they were going through.
Do women experience more work stress than men?
Women report more frequent work-related strain than men, with 50.0% affected weekly or daily compared to 43.7% of men. Women are also more likely to have called in sick with a fake reason (41.0% versus 35.6%), though both groups use AI for work stress at nearly identical rates.
Do managers experience the same stress as their employees?
Managers conceal work-related distress at almost the same rate as individual contributors, 76.7% versus 76.0%. Leaders are not more open about their struggles, but they are more likely to turn to AI for work stress, at 50.2% compared to 39.3% of individual contributors.
