An office employee, in this file photo. DC Studio/Shutterstock
Almost one in four Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance is staying in a job that they would otherwise leave out of fear of losing coverage, a new survey suggests.
The findings, released July 21 by the West Health-Gallup Center on Healthcare in America, show that 24 percent of Americans who rely primarily on employer-sponsored insurance—equivalent to about 23 million adults—feel trapped in their current jobs by concerns over health coverage. That represents an increase of 8 percentage points from 2021.
The phenomenon, which the analysts called “job lock,” was especially prevalent among employees facing financial pressure from medical expenses.
Among respondents with personal or household medical debt, 44 percent said they were staying in an unwanted job to preserve their health insurance, compared with 21 percent of those without medical debt, according to Gallup. The figure rose to 53 percent among workers who said healthcare costs caused them “a lot of stress” in their daily lives.
Employees with chronic health conditions were also more likely to report job lock. Twenty-nine percent of those with at least one chronic condition said they remained in an unwanted job for health benefits, compared with 17 percent of those without such a condition.
Women were more likely than men to say they were staying in jobs they would prefer to leave to maintain health coverage, with 30 percent of women reporting job lock, compared with 20 percent of men.
Job lock is linked to loss of productivity and less entrepreneurship and wage growth, according to Ellyn Maese, a research director at the West Health-Gallup Center and the author of the report. Unhappy workers are also more likely to suffer occupational injuries.
“The effects extend beyond morale—reducing labor market efficiency, upward mobility and quality of life,” Maese wrote.
The findings were based on a nationally representative survey conducted from Oct. 27 through Dec. 22, 2025, involving 5,660 U.S. adults. The analysis focused on 2,322 employed adults who relied on employer-sponsored health insurance as their primary source of coverage, with an error margin of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
Healthcare Costs Add to Americans’ Anxiety
The findings come as other surveys show anxiety among Americans over the cost and reliability of health coverage.
An April poll by health policy research group KFF found that 64 percent of U.S. adults were worried about being able to afford healthcare. This tied gasoline and transportation costs as the public’s leading financial concern and outranked worries about food, housing, and utilities.
Separately, a survey by the healthcare foundation Commonwealth Fund found that 21 percent of working-age adults with private insurance said their insurer had denied coverage for doctor-recommended medical care for themselves or a family member last year.
The rise in job lock also comes as Americans report a mixed view of employment prospects.
A Gallup analysis released in May, based on polling conducted in 2025, found that 43 percent of Americans ages 15 to 34 believed it was a good time to find a job where they lived, compared with 64 percent of those ages 55 and older.
That 21-point gap was the largest recorded among all 141 countries surveyed. Only five other places—China, Serbia, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, and Norway—had younger adults trailing older adults by at least 10 percentage points in their assessments of local job opportunities.
