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Nearly one in four American workers are staying in jobs they want to leave because they are worried about losing their health insurance, according to a new Gallup poll.
The poll found that 24 percent of employees with employer-sponsored insurance, equivalent to around 23 million adults, report feeling trapped in their jobs because of concerns around health coverage. This marks an 8-percentage-point increase from 2021.
Ellyn Maese, research director at Gallup, told Newsweek that the findings parallel other research on the growing health care affordability gap, where Americans are reporting having to “postpone milestones in their lives due to health expenses or to choose between paying for health care versus paying for meals, utilities, and other living expenses.”
Maese also pointed to other recent Gallup polls that have found that about seven in 10 Americans think it is a bad time to find a job in the U.S.
Millions of Americans face rising health care costs and growing uncertainty about covering health insurance, which is driving many to forgo health insurance entirely.
The Donald Trump administration allowed enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA)—also known as Obamacare—subsidies to expire at the end of 2025—tax credits that had expanded access to marketplace coverage for millions of Americans.
Without them, premiums were expected to rise by an average of 75 percent, according to analysis from the Peterson Center on Healthcare and KFF. Changes to Medicaid eligibility and cuts to the program have also amplified concerns around health insurance.
What the Gallup Poll Found
The poll by West Health-Gallup Center on Healthcare in America, released on Wednesday, found that “job lock” was especially common among workers under financial strain. 44 percent of respondents with medical debt said they were staying in unwanted jobs to keep their health insurance, while 53 percent of those reporting significant stress from health care costs said the same.
The findings likely suggest the “value of benefits is higher now,” Mark Pauly, a professor of health care management at the University of Pennsylvania, told Newsweek, meaning Americans are choosing to stay in jobs because of the “value of the package of wages and benefits.”
The Trump administration’s changes to the ACA marketplace and Medicaid has meant “alternatives to health insurance through one’s current employer have become more expensive and less accessible, so people are more likely to stay with their current job if it offers health insurance,” Martin Gaynor, a professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, told Newsweek.
The experts were also in agreement that this job lock is likely going to increase as health insurance costs are expected to continue rising. “Early insurer filings indicate that ACA premiums may increase again in the next year, driven in part by rising hospital costs, physician costs, and prescription drug spending,” Maese said.
Workers with chronic health conditions were also more likely to report job lock than those without—29 percent versus 17 percent. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those with three or more diagnoses were the most likely to stay in jobs for insurance benefits (41 percent).
Women were also more likely than men to say they were staying in their job purely for health benefits, with 30 percent reporting job lock compared with 20 percent of men.
Pauly said this is likely because “women of working age use their health insurance more than men.” Gaynor added that health insurance coverage for “pregnancy and childbirth are very important for women,” and that “single men generally don’t have this concern, and are usually healthy, so health insurance coverage is likely less of a priority.”
Maese said that women also “face greater healthcare affordability challenges.” She added that this is compounded by the fact that “women’s wages continue to lag behind men’s on average and recent analyses suggest that progress in closing the gender wage gap has slowed or reversed slightly.”
More broadly, Gaynor said that this job lock makes workers become “less mobile,” meaning employers “face less competitive pressure to pay well, offer decent benefits and opportunities for advancement, and maintain good working conditions, so jobs may pay less and become worse,” which he said “only exacerbate the decline in earnings that American workers are already experiencing, and which has been going on for some time.”
For workers, Maese said that job lock may also contribute to “greater stress, disengagement, and burnout, particularly if they feel trapped by concerns about losing health coverage.” This in turn can mean organizations “pay a price through productivity, higher absenteeism, reduced performance, and increased turnover costs,” she said.
At the economic level, job lock can also “negatively impact the labor market by discouraging workers from moving to jobs that better match their skills and interests,” Maese said. “Lower job mobility can also suppress wage growth and innovation by reducing competition for workers.”
The findings came from a Gallup study conducted between October 27 and December 22, 2025, that involved 5,660 U.S. adults. This analysis focused specifically on 2,322 employed adults who relied on employer-sponsored health insurance as their primary source of coverage. Gallup said the margin of error for that group was plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.
States Most Impacted by Rising Health Insurance Costs
A separate analysis by the prescription savings platform NiceRx also revealed how concerned Americans are about health insurance at present—the company found in early May that in the previous month, over 1.2 million Americans had searched for health insurance coverage online.
Based on a combination of factors, including the state’s uninsured population, health insurance plan searches per 100,000 people and average annual employee contribution to health coverage, NiceRx ranks states with an overall insurance stress score, indicating where residents face the most pressure.
Florida ranked as the state most stressed about health insurance, with a score of 8.73 out of 10.
South Carolina also ranked highly (8.2 out of 10), as did Alabama (8.1 out of 10), California (7.7 out of 10), and Kansas (7.6 out of 10).
The company also identified Texas as having the nation’s highest uninsured rate, with 16.7 percent of residents lacking health coverage, more than double the national average of 7.6 percent.
Other Southern states also featured in NiceRx’s ranking for having high uninsured populations, including Georgia (12 percent), Oklahoma (11.5 percent), and Florida (10.9 percent).
Other states facing significant insurance challenges included Idaho, which recorded the highest rate of health insurance-related internet searches, and Hawaii, where the cost of employer-sponsored family coverage has increased by 50.2 percent over the past decade, the largest rise in the country.
NiceRx said its analysis examined insurance coverage levels, uninsured rates, long-term premium growth and health insurance search demand across all 50 states. It used data from the U.S. Census Bureau, KFF, and others to source its information.
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