Financial Services Employee Engagement Statistics (2026)

US employee engagement fell to 31% engaged and 17% actively disengaged at the end of 2024 — the lowest level in a decade (Gallup, U.S. Employee Engagement Sinks to 10-Year Low, 2025). Engagement peaked at 36% in 2020 and has generally trended downward since, with each one-point change representing roughly 1.6 million workers. The 2024 reading matched 2014 levels, erasing a decade of incremental gains.

Finance and insurance was specifically named among four sectors — alongside transportation, technology, and professional services — where engagement fell in 2024 (Gallup, 2025). Gallup did not publish a discrete finance-sector engagement percentage in this release; the directional signal is documented but a sector-level percentage is not available.

GLOBAL: Globally, engagement dropped to 20% in 2025, down from a 2022 peak of 23% — a five-year low. The US and Canada remained the world's highest-engagement region at 31% (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026 Report, via secondary source; confirm against Gallup primary before headline use). This is a global figure, not a US-specific measure, and is distinct from the US engagement series above.

AI-displacement anxiety is especially acute in finance and insurance: 32% of employees in each sector fear their job will be eliminated by technology — the joint-highest rate among all industries measured (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026, secondary source; confirm against Gallup primary before headline use). Honest, specific AI communication — explaining how roles are changing rather than just reassuring — is part of the engagement answer for both sub-verticals.

Finance and insurance is the lowest-quitting major private sector in the US by a significant margin. The April 2026 preliminary quits rate was 1.1%, representing approximately 71,000 quits (BLS JOLTS, April 2026, preliminary, seasonally adjusted). The broader "financial activities" category ran 1.2%. Over the past five years, the sector's annual average ranged from 1.1% to 1.5% — its 2022 Great Resignation peak of 1.5% was still well below most comparable private sectors (BLS JOLTS annual averages, 2021–2025).

The independent all-industry context: total separations averaged 3.3% in 2025 (unchanged from 2024), with quits at 2.0% (BLS JOLTS, 2025 annual averages). Finance and insurance's 1.1%–1.5% range sits roughly half the national voluntary exit rate — which is why the sector's frontline turnover problems (detailed in the banking section below) are so often underestimated.

As of May 2026 (preliminary), finance and insurance employs approximately 6.66 million people in the US (BLS Current Employment Statistics, May 2026). Even at 1.1% monthly, that represents roughly 73,000 departures per month in absolute terms. The sector's low rate hides substantial sub-vertical and role-level variation that the aggregated figure obscures.

Non-officer (frontline) bank turnover is the sector's most visible engagement failure point. The Crowe Bank Compensation and Benefits Survey (2023) — the most recent published benchmark — recorded non-officer turnover at 19.8%, down from 23.4% in 2022. This is a vendor-reported figure (Crowe, n=388 banking organizations); pair with the BLS JOLTS sector data above as the independent anchor. The Crowe non-officer figure has been the canonical bank-frontline benchmark for several years; if Crowe publishes a 2024 or 2025 update, replace this figure.

Officer turnover moved in the opposite direction: 6.5% in 2023, up from 4.8% in 2022 and a trough of 3.2% in 2021 (Crowe Bank Compensation and Benefits Survey, 2023, vendor). The divergence — non-officer falling, officer rising — reflects distinct labor dynamics above and below the supervisory threshold, with compliance officers cited as a particularly high-demand and high-exit role.

The leading reasons bank employees leave, per Crowe (2023, vendor): lack of career development (45%) and inadequate total compensation (42%). Career development is the primary driver — not culture or perks. Pay is second. This ordering has direct implications for engagement strategy: recognition programs and wellness initiatives are multipliers, but a visible career ladder is the structural lever.

Independent employment anchors: FDIC-insured institutions employed 2,044,576 full-time equivalent employees as of Q1 2026 (FDIC Quarterly Banking Profile, Q1 2026, via FRED). Commercial banking specifically employed approximately 1.36 million as of February 2026 (BLS CES via FRED, Feb 2026). The BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook tracks tellers directly: 347,400 tellers employed in 2024 at a median annual wage of $39,340 — teller employment is projected to decline 13% through 2034, with roughly 29,800 annual openings driven almost entirely by replacement demand (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook / OEWS, May 2024).

Insurance's people data tells two stories simultaneously: today's hiring pressure and tomorrow's retirement cliff. Understanding both is the starting point for any engagement strategy in the sub-vertical.

Turnover today (vendor-reported): The Jacobson Group and Aon's Q3 2025 Insurance Labor Market Study recorded 12-month voluntary turnover at 9.2%, up 0.6 percentage points year-over-year. Personal-lines P&C companies reported the highest voluntary turnover at 10.7% (Jacobson Group/Aon Insurance Labor Market Study, Q3 2025, vendor). Despite this, 53% of insurers plan to increase staff over the next 12 months, and 81% expect revenue growth (Jacobson Group/Aon, Q3 2025, vendor). The independent employment anchor: insurance carriers and related activities (NAICS 524) employed approximately 2.95 million people as of May 2026 (BLS Current Employment Statistics, May 2026, preliminary).

The retirement cliff: Widely cited projections place ~400,000 insurance workers exiting by 2026, with 50% of the current insurance workforce retiring within 15 years (Jonus Group/RSM US, citing BLS projections). This 400,000 figure is near-ubiquitous in trade press; the primary BLS projection table was not directly verified — treat it as widely cited industry consensus, not a confirmed BLS publication number. The demographic profile: approximately 1.37 million insurance professionals are aged 55 or older — nearly 1 in 4 workers — against only 214,000 aged 20–24; the median age is 44 (Jonus Group, citing BLS, 2025 — secondary source; confirm against BLS primary before headline use). The approximately 6:1 ratio of near-retirement-age to entry-level workers is the defining structural challenge.

Compounding this: 32% of insurance employees fear their job will be eliminated by technology — joint-highest among all sectors (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026, secondary source). Engagement in insurance is simultaneously a retention problem, a knowledge-transfer problem, and an AI-anxiety-management problem — all three require a coordinated response.

Wealth Management

All wealth management figures below are vendor-reported (Cerulli Associates) — the canonical advisor data provider for the sub-vertical. Pair with independent context (BLS employment data, JOLTS sector rates) where possible.

More than 72% of rookie financial advisor trainees (three or fewer years) dropped out before becoming full-fledged advisors in 2022 — roughly matching the prior year's failure rate (Cerulli Associates, U.S. Advisor Metrics, vendor). Total advisor headcount stands at 283,137 as of end-2023, having grown just 0.2% over the prior decade (Cerulli, U.S. Advisor Metrics 2024, vendor). New advisors barely offset trainee failures and retirements; the structural gap is widening. Looking ahead, 105,887 advisors — representing 37.4% of industry headcount and 41.4% of total assets — plan to retire within 10 years, with 26% unsure of their succession plan (Cerulli, U.S. Advisor Metrics 2024, vendor).

Credit Unions

Credit union turnover runs approximately 20%, consistent across asset sizes, per the BalancedComp Survey (2024, vendor). Pair this with the BLS JOLTS sector-level data (1.1% monthly quits for finance and insurance) as the independent anchor; BalancedComp's survey covers banks and credit unions jointly.

A separate credit union-specific finding: 65% of surveyed full-time credit union employees report feeling burned out, and 72% say burnout affected their on-the-job performance — yet 84% report job satisfaction (Credit Union Times, via O2 Consulting Group, 2024 — secondary source; confirm against Credit Union Times primary before headline use). The coexistence of high satisfaction and high burnout points to workload and staffing, not culture or purpose, as the root cause.

Accounting

AICPA's 2025 Trends Report is an independent professional-body source and the primary anchor for accounting pipeline data. Accounting programs awarded 55,152 bachelor's and master's degrees in 2023–24, down 6.6% year-over-year (bachelor's −3.3%, master's −15%) (AICPA 2025 Trends Report). New CPA exam candidates fell from 42,626 in 2023 to 28,082 in 2024 — the first year of the new CPA Evolution exam model (AICPA 2025 Trends Report). One positive sign: 2024–25 enrollment data showed a 12% year-over-year increase (National Student Clearinghouse) — a possible rebound not yet reflected in CPA candidate flow.

Demand has not softened to match the supply contraction: 75% of accounting firms that hired in 2024 expect to hire the same number or more, with 11,985 new graduates hired in 2024 (AICPA 2025 Trends Report; caveat: approximately 1% firm response rate — the aggregate hiring figure may not be projectable with confidence).

Fintech engagement and attrition data has a documented benchmark gap. No credible fintech-specific employee engagement or attrition rate exists. BLS does not define "fintech" as a discrete industry — fintech workers span NAICS 52, 518, and 5415 and are counted across multiple classifications. No independent survey has produced a fintech-specific engagement or attrition figure. Circulating numbers such as "~20% annual turnover" or "1.5–2× salary replacement cost in fintech" trace to vendor or aggregator sources and should not be treated as established benchmarks.

Available proxies — all vendor-reported or journalistic; use with explicit source attribution:

• 68% of finance-firm executives noted increased turnover; 50% reported layoffs in 2024 (Fiverr/Censuswide Finance Executive Report, 2024 — vendor-reported; sample is 501 medium/large US finance firms that use freelancers; selection bias applies).
• More than 100 fintechs cut staff between 2022 and 2023; roughly two dozen more by mid-2024; Block, for example, cut approximately 1,000 employees (10% of staff) in January 2024 (Banking Dive fintech layoffs tracker, 2024 — journalistic compilation, not an official statistic).
• Approximately 40% of bank and fintech employees are considering leaving the industry due to burnout (Hapax, via American Banker, 2024 — vendor-reported; methodology not disclosed).

These proxies point to volatility — layoffs, restructuring, and survivor burnout — rather than a stable attrition benchmark. The structural engagement levers for fintech (transparency through instability, sustainable workload, clear career progression) are covered in Employee Engagement for Fintech Companies.

The business case for engagement is anchored on Gallup's Q12 meta-analysis — the most-cited cross-industry evidence base. Comparing top-quartile versus bottom-quartile engaged business units, top-quartile units show 21% higher profitability, 20% higher sales/production, 10% higher customer ratings, 70% fewer safety incidents, and 24–59% lower turnover (Gallup Q12 Meta-Analysis, 9th edition, 2016). Note this is the 2016 ninth-edition figure; newer Gallup summaries reference higher profitability deltas for later editions. For banks and insurers, the safety/error and customer-rating links are especially relevant — error rates and service quality carry direct regulatory and reputational consequences.

"The quality of management explains 70% of the variance in team engagement." — Gallup, 2024

GLOBAL: Low engagement cost the world economy more than $10 trillion in lost productivity in 2024 — approximately 9% of global GDP (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026 Report). This is a global figure, not finance-specific or US-specific. Earlier editions of the same Gallup series cited $8.9 trillion for the same period (2024 State of the Global Workplace report); the 2026 report revised the figure upward. Always pin to a specific Gallup edition when citing — the figure shifts across releases.

The manager is the highest-leverage individual variable in any engagement strategy. Gallup's ongoing study across 183,806 business units found that manager quality explains 70% of the variance in team engagement scores (Gallup, 2024). This is the canonical "70% manager" finding — the practical implication for financial services is that firm-wide engagement programs, survey initiatives, and recognition spend that bypass manager coaching and enablement deliver a fraction of their potential impact. Equipping branch managers, claims supervisors, and team leads with sentiment visibility and coaching skills is the highest-return structural investment in the engagement stack.

Recognition is simultaneously the largest actionable engagement lever and the most underused one in financial services. Workhuman and Gallup's longitudinal study (The Human-Centered Workplace, 2024) tracked 3,447 employees over two years: well-recognized employees were 45% less likely to have turned over after two years (Gallup/Workhuman, The Human-Centered Workplace, 2024 — vendor-reported; Workhuman is a co-author; cross-industry, not finance-specific).

The gap this finding exposes: more than half (55%) of all US employees receive no recognition at all, or recognition that fails to meet any of the five quality pillars — fulfilling, authentic, personalized, equitable, and embedded (Gallup/Workhuman, 2024, vendor). The recognition deficit is not marginal; it describes the median US employee experience. A modeled estimate (Gallup/Workhuman, vendor): a 10,000-person organization can save more than $16M annually in turnover costs by making recognition a strategic priority. Treat as a modeled estimate, not a controlled study outcome.

For financial services, recognition operates against a compliance backdrop many firms misread. FINRA Rule 3220 governs gifts to employees of other firms — not internal recognition of your own people. Rule 3220.09, effective March 30, 2026, explicitly clarifies the Gifts Rule "does not apply to gifts from a member to its own associated persons." The real design constraints are Reg BI (no sales-target contests) and tax law (cash and gift cards are always taxable wages per IRS Publication 15-B, 2026). Values-based, non-cash, conduct-and-service-anchored peer recognition sidesteps all three traps and is the compliant default for banks and broker-dealers.

A word on the action layer. A stat library is only as useful as what happens next. Once a number surfaces a gap — a 19.8% frontline turnover rate, a 55% recognition deficit, a 65% burnout reading in credit unions — the question is what you actually do about it. Software is a multiplier on the structural fixes (career paths, manager quality, pay equity), not a substitute for them. On the recognition side, Actify operates as the post-stat action layer: activities, peer recognition, participation dashboards, and values-based recognition that can clear a compliance review — not the survey engine or the data source itself.