Average employee tenure: How long do staff stay in a job?

Staff turnover in most businesses is concentrated among newer starters, many of whom leave within their first year or two, while a core of long-serving employees remains. National data reflects the same pattern. The average employee has been with their current employer for 9.4 years [1], but nearly four in 10 have been there for less than three years [2].

This is why it is difficult to give a single answer when someone asks how long employees tend to stay in a job, and why published figures on the subject range from more than nine years to around two, depending on where you look and who has been counted.

In this article, we look at what the average figure means, who tends to stay or move, why fewer people have changed jobs in 2026, and how length of service affects employment rights.

Summary

• The average employee has been with their current employer for 9.4 years, according to OECD data for 2025 [1].
• Service is unevenly spread, with around 38% of employees having been in post for under three years and 47% for five years or more [2].
• Lower figures of between two and four years tend to come from narrower sources, such as CVs, LinkedIn profiles, and technology payroll data.
• Younger workers and those in hospitality and retail move most often, whilst older workers and those in more specialist roles tend to stay longer.
• Tenure has remained relatively stable over the long term, largely because an ageing workforce has offset shorter periods of employment among younger workers [3][4].
• Fewer employees moved jobs in 2026, as vacancies and recruitment plans remain low [5][6].
• From 1 January 2027, employees will qualify for ordinary unfair dismissal protection after six months' service, down from two years [7].

What is the average length of employee tenure?

Employee tenure is the length of time someone has worked for their current employer. The broadest measure available comes from the OECD, which puts the average at 9.4 years for 2025, with very little difference between men (9.5 years) and women (9.2 years) [1].

If you search for the same information elsewhere, you are likely to find much lower numbers. This does not mean that any of the sources is wrong, as each is measuring something slightly different, and the table below shows how far the answer can move as a result.

Much of the difference comes down to who is included. The OECD figure covers employees across the whole economy, including older workers and long-serving public sector staff, whereas CV and job platform data leans towards people who are actively changing jobs. The job site Indeed makes this point about its own research, noting that job switching on its platform is likely to be higher than in the wider labour market [12].

The type of average matters as well. A mean adds up everyone's service and divides it by the number of employees, whereas a median is the midpoint when employees are placed in order of service. In a team with 1, 1, 2, 3, and 18 years' service, for example, the mean would be 5 years even though four of the five people have been there for three years or less, and the median of 2 years gives a much closer picture of the team.

It is also worth remembering that most surveys record how long current employees have been in post so far, which is different from how long they will eventually stay.

The 9.4-year figure therefore gives the widest view of the workforce, but because it is a mean, it can be lifted considerably by people with very long service. To understand what it represents, it helps to look at how service is spread across employees.

Two groups behind one average

The OECD's data shows that relatively few employees sit close to the average, with most falling towards one end of the range or the other [2].

Taken together, around 38% of employees have under three years' service and 47% have five years or more, leaving only 15% in between. The largest single group is made up of those who have been with their employer for at least a decade, and it is these employees who bring the mean up to 9.4 years.

The CIPD's analysis of turnover helps to explain how the two groups can exist side by side [13]. It found that around two-thirds of employees remain with the same organisation from one year to the next, whilst the remaining 34% are made up of 27.4% who move to a new employer and 6.6% who are not working a year later, which can reflect study, retirement, or long-term sickness. A labour market can therefore have high turnover and a long average tenure at the same time, because some roles change hands frequently whilst others rarely do.

Technology payroll data points in the same direction, although it covers a much narrower group. Across Europe, Ravio found that technology employees who were still with their company had a median tenure of 857 days, compared with 442 days, or around 15 months, for those who had left [11].

Compared with other countries, the main difference in Britain is at the long-service end [1][2]. The share of employees with under a year's service (14.5%) is close to Germany's (15.7%), but 28.9% have 10 years' service or more, compared with 36.5% in Germany, 38.7% in France, and 46.0% in Italy. Average tenure is also lower, at 9.4 years compared with 10.0 in Germany and 12.1 in Italy, although it is higher than in Sweden (8.3 years), the Netherlands (7.8 years), and Denmark (7.1 years). Differences in workforce age, contract types, and employment law all play a part in these figures, so they are best treated as a broad comparison.

Who stays and who moves

Which of the two groups an employee falls into depends largely on their age and the type of work they do.

Age is the clearest dividing line, partly because younger employees have simply had less time to build up service, but also because they are more likely to change jobs. Research from the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics found that workers aged 16 to 24 are much more likely to move than older colleagues, and that fewer than 2% of those aged over 45 change jobs in a typical quarter [4]. The OECD's data shows how this builds up over a working life, with average tenure rising from 2.1 years among those aged 15 to 24 to 7.6 years at 35 to 39, 13.6 years at 50 to 54, and 16.0 years at 55 to 64 [1]. Around 38% of employees aged 15 to 24 have been in post for less than a year, whereas just over half (51.5%) of those aged 55 to 64 have been with their employer for at least 10 years [2].

Much has been written about whether Gen Z will change this pattern, and the research is mixed. Randstad's global study puts Gen Z's average tenure during the first five years of their careers at 1.1 years, compared with 1.8 years for Millennials and 2.8 years for Gen X at the same stage [14]. Its findings for Britain show that 64% of Gen Z workers plan to leave their current company within two years [15], and Hays found that just 15% of employees aged 16 to 24 expect to stay in a job for more than five years, compared with 43% of those aged over 50 [10].

Admiral's research with 2,000 employees suggests a different picture, as 75% of 18 to 27-year-olds said they wanted more secure, longer-term tenure and the average Gen Z employee hoped to stay in a job for seven years [9]. These findings do not necessarily contradict each other, since one set records what younger workers have done so far and the other records what they would like to happen. Many early-career roles are also temporary or used as a stepping stone, which can make it difficult to stay for long even where someone would prefer to.

The type of work matters for similar reasons, with tenure tending to be shortest in roles that are entry-level, lower paid, or easy to move between. Hospitality is the clearest example, as the CIPD found that it has the highest churn and lowest tenure of any industry, with more than a third of staff in role for less than a year [13]. It also has the youngest workforce by a substantial margin, and the CIPD notes that high churn can be less damaging in roles of this kind because the cost of training a replacement is lower.

Vestd's analysis of LinkedIn profiles shows the same divide, with a median tenure of 3 years in hospitality compared with 5.3 years in manufacturing [8]. We cover these differences in more detail in our guide to staff turnover rates by industry.

Indeed's analysis of CVs, published in March 2026, gives a more recent view of how often people move. The table below shows the share of its users who started a new job in an average month between 2022 and mid-2025 [12]. These rates are likely to be higher than in the wider labour market, so they are most useful for comparing occupations.

Many employees also change employers without leaving their line of work. However, this varies considerably by sector. Indeed found that 87% of hospitality workers who changed jobs moved into a different occupation, as did 82% of those in retail, compared with 46% in nursing and 37% in dentistry [12]. People who have invested years in training for a profession are more likely to stay in it, even when they leave a particular employer.

Adult social care shows this distinction within a single sector. Skills for Care reports that workers in England have spent an average of 4.7 years in their current role but 9.2 years in the sector, and that 53% of recruitment comes from within adult social care [16]. Its data also shows how the likelihood of leaving falls with time, as care worker turnover drops from 34.0% among those with less than a year in their role to 15.3% among those with 20 years or more.

Is tenure getting shorter?

Since younger workers move so often, it is easy to assume that tenure has been falling for some time, but the long-term evidence is more mixed than that. A 2024 study of Western Europe's six most populous countries found that average tenure stayed at about 11 years between 1993 and 2021 [3]. The researchers did find that people of any given age had shorter tenure by the end of the period, but the workforce had aged enough to keep the overall average steady.

The London School of Economics research found something similar when it looked at how often people change jobs. In 2000, 2.8% of workers moved jobs each quarter, and by 2019 this had fallen to 2.1% [4]. Around two-thirds of that fall was explained by changes in the make-up of the workforce, mainly the growing number of workers aged 45 and over and the rising share of people in professional occupations, both of which tend to move less often.

Shorter-term changes have been fairly modest. OECD figures show that average tenure slipped from 9.6 years in 2020 to 9.4 years in 2025 [1], and that the share of employees with at least 10 years' service fell from 31.1% to 28.9% [2]. The share with less than a year's service rose to 19.3% in 2022, during the recruitment surge that followed the pandemic, but it has fallen every year since and stood at 14.5% in 2025, the lowest level in that period. This suggests that the more recent movement has been towards people staying where they are.

Why fewer employees are moving in 2026

The main reason appears to be that there are fewer jobs to move to. The CIPD's Labour Market Outlook for summer 2026 describes a "low hire, low fire" environment, in which 57% of private sector employers planned to recruit over the following three months, the lowest figure outside the pandemic since the measure began in 2016 [6]. Vacancies have since fallen to 691,000, their lowest level outside the pandemic since 2014 [17].

People are still changing jobs, with around 2.9 million doing so in 2025 [12], but the reasons have shifted. Office for National Statistics data shows that 243,000 job moves in the second quarter of 2026 followed a resignation, compared with 379,000 at the peak at the end of 2021, whereas moves following dismissal or redundancy rose from 28,000 to 54,000 over the same period [5]. Technology data suggests that this is already feeding through to tenure, with Ravio's median for British employees rising from 694 days in 2024 to 814 days in 2026, and annual attrition falling from 18.8% to 12.1% over the past year [11][18].

Staying in a job does not necessarily mean that someone wants to be there, and this has led to the term "job hugging" for employees who hold on to a role mainly because moving feels too risky. In Employment Hero's 2025 Annual Jobs Report, 55% of employees said they were putting job security ahead of ambition, and 51% did not feel confident about finding a new job within three months [19]. LinkedIn research published in March 2026 found that 71% of recruiters had seen more employees remaining in roles despite feeling disengaged [20].

Lower resignation rates have not removed retention pressure altogether. In the CIPD's Resourcing and talent planning report 2026, 44% of employers said that talent had become more difficult to retain [21], and three in 10 still have hard-to-fill vacancies [6], which suggests that the picture depends a good deal on how scarce the skills in question are.

Pay may also be influencing some of these decisions. The London School of Economics research found that people who changed employer saw wage growth around 5.6% higher on average than those who stayed, based on data running to 2019 [4]. There is less recent evidence, but a 2025 analysis by Furniture At Work reported rises of 4.8% for those who moved and 4.6% for those who stayed [22]. The two studies use different methods and cannot be compared directly, but if the gap has narrowed, employees may have less financial reason to look elsewhere.

The effect on small businesses

Smaller employers have been especially affected by the slowdown in hiring. Businesses with between one and nine employees accounted for 12,000 of the 13,000 fall in vacancies in the latest quarter [23], and Employment Hero reported that annual employment growth among small businesses slowed from 7.8% to 2.5% during 2025 [24].

There is less evidence on tenure by employer size, and what exists is mixed. Vestd found a median of 2.9 years in business sector SMEs compared with 4.1 years in larger enterprises, but the pattern reversed in IT, at 3.3 years and 2.8 years respectively [25].

Averages are also harder to interpret in a small team, where one retirement after 25 years of service can change the mean by several years. A single departure can have a wider effect too, as HiBob's 2025 research found that 31% of SME employees had quit after a colleague left [26].

What a tenure figure can and cannot show

For all of these reasons, a tenure figure means little on its own. An average of three years might be typical for a hospitality business but low for a manufacturer, and the same number could describe a team where most people have been in post for around three years or one where a few long-serving colleagues offset a high number of early leavers. The median and the share of staff in each service band will usually show more than the mean, and the age of the workforce matters as well, since an older workforce tends to produce a longer average regardless of how many new starters stay.

The reasons behind a figure are just as relevant as the figure itself. Retirement, redundancy, dismissal, and resignation all bring tenure to an end, but they reflect very different events, and tenure can lengthen simply because there are fewer jobs to move to, as the data for 2026 suggests.

Neither long nor short tenure is automatically better. The cost of replacing an employee is often estimated at between 50% and 200% of annual salary, but the CIPD also notes that very low turnover can limit the arrival of new ideas [13]. Manufacturing offers a useful example, as Make UK recorded turnover of just 10.85% in 2024, by which point retirement had become the main reason for leaving, so the sector's challenge is increasingly about passing on experience as long-serving employees retire.

Looking ahead

The evidence on all of this should improve shortly, as the Office for National Statistics plans to publish new data on hires and job moves on 23 November 2026, drawn from linked employer and employee records [32].

What remains to be seen is whether tenures will continue to increase or start to decline. An ageing workforce should continue to support the average over the long term, but much of the fall in resignations appears to be linked to a cautious jobs market, and it may not be clear how many employees are staying by choice until hiring picks up again.

This article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. The information is accurate at the time of writing but may be subject to change. For advice specific to your situation, please consult a qualified professional.

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[32] Office for National Statistics, Insights on UK labour market dynamism from linked employer-employee data: 2014 to 2026, provisional release date 23 November 2026.