Unemployment around the world is near its lowest in decades. Jobs are not hard to find. And yet fewer than 1 in 4 workers think their own job is safe.
ADP runs payroll for millions of workers, so it sees the job market up close. Its ADP survey asked more than 39,000 people across 36 markets how safe they feel.
Only 22% strongly agreed their job was safe from being cut. And that fear is not spread evenly.
Frontline workers make up most of any company. Just 18% of them felt secure.
The bosses at the top felt much safer, at 35%. The gap grows wider the higher you go.
Middle managers sat at 23%, while upper managers reached 31%. So the worry is heaviest for the people who can least afford to lose a paycheck.
The findings come from ADP's People at Work 2026 report. It's a yearly look at how workers really feel about their jobs.
Even with jobs easy to find, the mood is grim. That mix is unusual.
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Confidence swings hard by country. Nigeria topped the list at 38%, while Japan sat dead last at just 5%.
Closer to home, 28% of U.S. workers felt secure. In the U.K., only 25% did.
ADP also tracks private payrolls each month. Those reports point to a job market that keeps cooling.
The survey ran across 2025 and covered 36 markets. It also asked about pay, stress, and extra hours, but the job-safety number was the one that jumped out.
Today's workforce is unusually mixed. For the first time, five generations are working side by side, from teens to people in their 70s.
That makes a shared worry stand out even more. Across ages and titles, the fear of losing a job keeps showing up.
Scared workers tend to be less engaged and less productive. They also spend more time looking for the door.
That's a quiet cost companies end up carrying. A worried team is a slower team, even when sales look fine.
The drag is easy to miss because it doesn't show up on one report. It builds slowly across a whole company.
That kind of fear can spread fast inside a team. Once it sets in, it's hard to shake.
Companies spend real money replacing people who quit. They lose speed when workers hold back, too.
Strong morale is hard to measure, but it shows up in results over time. Weak morale does the same.
A strong job market usually calms people's nerves, but this one hasn't. Workers are keeping their jobs and still bracing to lose them.
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