The Harris Poll's 2026 Healthcare Workforce Barometer found that 59.0% of full-time health care workers are likely to look at job openings, interview, or switch roles within the next year. That share is up from 55.0% in 2025, and it rises to 70.0% among Gen Z workers, the group many independent practices rely on for front-desk, medical assistant, and entry-level clinical roles.
The Harris Poll, commissioned jointly by Workforce Edge and Strategic Education, Inc., surveyed 1,514 full-time direct patient care employees and 304 health care employers at the director level or higher between June 12 and July 1, 2026. The gap between what workers report and what employers believe runs through most of the findings, and it matters most for practices too small to run a dedicated workforce-planning function.
The generation most likely to leave
Turnover risk is not spread evenly across a practice's staff. The barometer found 70.0% of Gen Z health care workers plan to explore a new position in the next year, compared with 64.0% of millennials, 49.0% of Gen X workers, and 31.0% of baby boomers. A practice that leans on younger staff for scheduling, billing support, and medical assistant roles carries more of this risk than one with an older, longer-tenured team, since Gen Z and millennials, the two youngest cohorts, both report turnover intent above 60.0%.
The overall 59.0% figure is itself a one-year increase from 55.0% in the 2025 edition of the same barometer. A four-point rise on a base that already crossed the halfway mark points to a workforce more open to moving than it was twelve months earlier.
Employers are undercounting the risk
Health care employers in the barometer did not see the scale of the problem. Employers estimated that 39.0% of their clinical staff were actively seeking new roles, while workers themselves reported 59.0%, a 20 point gap. A second measure showed the same pattern: 42.0% of workers said they were exploring positions outside their current organization, against an employer estimate of 32.0%. Either gap is large enough that a staffing plan built on the employer estimate would understate open-role risk by roughly a third.
Employers read the generational split more accurately. 46.0% of employers named Gen Z as the group hardest to retain, which lines up with that generation's 70.0% turnover-intent figure. The table below sets the worker-reported and employer-estimated numbers side by side.
| Measure | Worker-reported | Employer-estimated |
|---|---|---|
| Likely to seek a new role in the next year | 59.0% | 39.0% |
| Actively exploring positions outside current employer | 42.0% | 32.0% |
Source: The Harris Poll, 2026 Healthcare Workforce Barometer, commissioned by Workforce Edge (1,514 employees, 304 employers, surveyed June 12 to July 1, 2026).
What keeps Gen Z from walking
Gen Z workers are not indifferent to stability. 95.0% called job stability essential to their career decisions, and 65.0% said they expect to stay with an employer for five years or more if the role meets their needs. What they say they are not getting is a clear path upward: 89.0% called advancement opportunities important to them, and 71.0% said the speed of that progression matters directly.
Trust sits in the gap between those two findings. Only 26.0% of workers said they trust their employer to support their career growth, and on the employer side, 47.0% acknowledged that a lack of advancement opportunity drives departures. A practice that can point to a real path from front desk to lead scheduler, or from medical assistant to office manager, is working against a trust gap the barometer has already measured.
The education-benefit gap
97.0% of health care employers call retention a top priority, according to the same barometer, yet fewer than half report a workforce education strategy built to support it. Training and tuition benefits show the same pattern of employers overestimating their own performance elsewhere in the barometer. 75.0% of workers said they want access to degree or certification programs, and 81.0% said they are specifically interested in employer-sponsored education. On the employer side, 89.0% believe their education benefits deliver a return on investment, yet only 48.0% have a formal education strategy in place, and 52.0% treat education as a strategic priority rather than a line-item perk.
Awareness compounds the gap. Employers reported that 69.0% of their workforce knows about available education benefits, while workers themselves reported only 58.0% awareness, an 11 point difference between what a practice believes it communicated and what staff actually received.
AI training and the shortage behind it all
The barometer also tracked how health care employers think about artificial intelligence skills, and confidence dropped within a single year. In the 2025 barometer, 89.0% of employers said AI skills were critical for employees to stay competitive; in 2026, that fell to 79.0%. Even so, 78.0% of employers said they feel a duty to provide AI training. On the worker side, only 48.0% said they are comfortable using AI tools, and 39.0% reported no change to their workflow from AI at all. Workers were split on what AI means for their own jobs: 45.0% said they trust AI tools to benefit patients, and 66.0% said they believe their own role carries a lower risk of automation than other health care jobs.
The Harris Poll ties these retention numbers to a labor shortage that the Health Resources and Services Administration projects will reach nearly 500,000 critical health care workers by 2038. One in three registered nurses is already over age 50.
Sources
- HIT Consultant, "Harris Poll Reveals 70% of Gen Z Healthcare Workers Eye Departure as U.S. Faces 500,000-Worker Shortage," September 18, 2026
- Medical Economics, "59% of health care workers plan to job hunt," September 2026
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