Compensation jumped from fifth to first place as the top reason employees stay in 2026, up 24 percentage points year over year, according to a global McKinsey survey.
McKinsey’s “HR Monitor 2026,” published in June, surveyed approximately 1,300 HR professionals and 5,500 employees across the U.S., Europe and China in January.
Here are six things to know:
1. Pay dethrones job security as No. 1. More than half of survey respondents cited compensation as a key retention driver, followed by work-life balance (46%), job security (45%) and flexibility (33%). Job security held the top spot in 2025. Despite compensation ranking No. 1 for both employees and HR professionals, 57% of employees reported no salary increase in the past 12 months.
2. Healthcare attrition driven by retirements. Voluntary turnover fell 2 percentage points globally, but McKinsey attributes the decline to economic caution and limited external options rather than rising engagement. Nearly 12% of global employees left their organizations in 2025. While sectors like electronics saw high voluntary exits, attrition in healthcare is largely retirement-driven — a pipeline pressure that health system chief human resources officers are already navigating.
3. Employees are getting far less feedback than HR thinks. One in 5 employees reported no career development meeting or feedback session in the past year, while HR professionals estimated only 3% were never evaluated. More than half of employees receive formal feedback once or twice a year, a frequency McKinsey said is too low to meaningfully support development.
4. An employee-HR performance disconnect. In the U.S., 53% of employees rated their own performance above expectations, while HR professionals rated only 34% of employees as above average, which was one of the largest self-assessment gaps of any country surveyed.
5. AI training coverage remains low and uneven. Just over 30% of U.S. employees reported receiving formal generative AI training, down 14 percentage points from 2025, which was the steepest decline of any country surveyed.
6. HR professionals overestimate training’s importance to retention. An 8-percentage-point gap exists between how much HR leaders value learning opportunities as a retention driver and how much employees actually do. Compensation, work-life balance and job security consistently outranked development opportunities across all generations surveyed, including Generation Z.
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