90% of employees report money worries, a five-year high

Nine in 10 employees reported money worries in 2025, a five-year high, according to Betterment at Work's 2025 Retirement Readiness Report. That figure has climbed from 71% in 2022, and it lands as 75% of workers say financial benefits matter more to them now than they did a year ago.

The survey puts hard numbers on a retention risk that most benefits programs have not addressed. More than half of employees — 57% — said they would switch jobs for a better benefits package. For HR leaders, that turns benefits design from a cost line into a direct lever on attrition, and the report suggests employers are flying blind on whether their current offerings work.

What is driving the anxiety?

Betterment at Work identified three leading causes: inflation, debt and housing costs. Persistent economic pressure compounds all three, the report found.

The 19-percentage-point rise since 2022 — from 71% to 90% — indicates the problem is broadening rather than resolving. If the trend holds, financial stress will touch nearly the entire workforce, not a struggling segment of it.

The takeaway: financial anxiety is now close to universal, and employers that treat it as a niche concern are reading the data wrong.

Why enrollment data cannot answer the benefits question

The report's sharper claim concerns measurement, not sentiment. Most benefits programs have not kept pace with what employees now want, according to the findings, and the data plan sponsors typically lean on cannot explain why.

Enrollment numbers, the report argues, record decisions made under specific constraints — an employee's plan choice at a single point in time. They do not reveal whether a benefit actually meets someone's needs today. A worker may enroll in a program because it is the default, the cheapest option or the only one offered, and the enrollment tally will look identical whether the benefit serves that worker well or not at all.

That gap matters for people-process decisions. If HR teams calibrate offerings against participation metrics alone, they may conclude a benefit is successful when it is merely present. The report does not spell out what should replace enrollment data, and that omission is worth noting — employers get a diagnosis of the measurement problem, not a validated alternative.

The takeaway: participation figures show what employees chose, not what they need, and the difference is where benefits strategy succeeds or fails.

Should employers survey needs directly?

The report's implicit recommendation is to stop guessing. Employees have already said, in large majorities, that financial benefits carry more weight than a year ago and that a better package would move them to another employer. Those two data points together suggest benefits communication and design reviews belong on the same cadence as compensation benchmarking.

A caveat follows the promise. The report comes from a benefits vendor with a commercial interest in financial wellness offerings, and the published excerpt does not disclose the sample size or methodology behind the 90% and 57% figures. HR leaders should weigh the direction of the findings — steep, consistent, unfavorable — while asking for the underlying sample before acting on any single number.

The takeaway: the signal is strong enough to justify a benefits review now, but the survey's basis deserves scrutiny first.

What comes next?

With a majority of workers signaling willingness to leave over benefits, retention planning for 2026 will likely need to treat financial wellness as core rather than supplementary. Whether employers can measure needs effectively, absent the enrollment data the report discredits, is the open question the data does not yet answer.