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Somebody says it at every farewell party. The manager raises a glass, thanks the team, and someone near the back says the line everyone already knows: well, it’s lonely at the top.
It is one of those phrases that sounds like it was measured. It has the shape of a finding. And for years almost nobody checked it, because it felt obviously true. The person in charge carries things they cannot say out loud. Everyone below them gets to go home.
Gallup checked it.
Its latest global workplace report, published for 2026 and built on 2025 survey data, asked workers around the world a very specific question: did you feel loneliness a lot of the day yesterday? Then it split the answers by job level.
Managers: 23%. Individual contributors, meaning everyone with nobody reporting to them: 21%.
Two points. That is the whole of the gap at the top.
So Is It Lonely at the Top? Barely.
Two percentage points is not nothing. But it is nowhere near the story the phrase tells.
The phrase implies a cliff. It says leadership is a different emotional country, and that the people below are basically fine. The data describes a gentle slope. Roughly one in four managers felt lonely a lot of yesterday. So did roughly one in five of everybody else.
Which means the loneliest person in the building is about as likely to be at the next desk as in the corner office. There is no height you reach where this begins. For most people it was already there.
That is worth saying plainly, because a stronger version of this claim is going around. You may have seen it said that senior leaders came out about ten points lonelier than their staff. Gallup’s published figures do not show that. They split the workforce into managers and individual contributors, and the distance between those two groups is two points. They do not report a separate senior-leader figure at all.
The Number Underneath, Which Almost Nobody Repeats
Here is the part that got buried. Worldwide, 22% of employees felt loneliness a lot of the previous day in 2025. In 2024 it was also 22%. In 2023 it was 20%.
Up two, then flat.
That is a quietly important shape, because the usual way to talk about this is that the loneliness epidemic is accelerating. At work, across the whole world, for two years running, it has not accelerated. It climbed once and then sat still.
That is not good news, exactly. A fifth of working humanity is an enormous number of people. But it is a different problem from a runaway one. Something that has levelled off can be worked on. It is also worth reading next to a stranger finding on the same workforce, where belonging and feeling valued fell from the top of the engagement list to the bottom over nine years. People did not stop needing it. They stopped expecting work to supply it.
The Old Line Names the Wrong Feeling
This is the part that changes how the whole table reads.
Gallup asked about several feelings from the previous day, not only loneliness, and split every one of them by job level. Lined up together they say something the famous phrase gets half right and still gets wrong:
- Stress: managers 45%, individual contributors 39%. A six-point gap.
- Anger: managers 25%, individual contributors 21%. Four points.
- Loneliness: managers 23%, individual contributors 21%. Two points.
- Sadness: managers 23%, individual contributors 23%. Dead level.
Read down that list slowly. The top really is harder, and the gap is widest on stress, where it is three times the size of the loneliness gap. The old line is pointing at something real. It simply picked the wrong word for it.
“It’s stressful at the top” would have been defensible. “It’s lonely at the top” borrowed the credibility of the first and spent it on the second.
And look at sadness, the heaviest feeling on the list. It is identical on both sides of the org chart. The same share of managers and non-managers had a sad day yesterday. Whatever a title buys you, it does not buy a different relationship with sadness.
One more line from the same report sits oddly beside all of this: managers were slightly more engaged at work than individual contributors, 22% against 19%. So the picture at the top is not misery. It is somebody more invested and more stressed at the same time, which for anyone who has ever run a team is probably the most recognisable sentence here.
Why One Survey Says 22% and Another Says 82%
Go looking for workplace loneliness figures and you will quickly meet much bigger ones. A separate survey by EY of more than 5,000 workers across Brazil, China, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States found that 82% say they have felt lonely at work.
Both numbers can be true, because they are not answers to the same question.
Gallup asked whether you felt it a lot of the day yesterday. EY asked whether you have ever felt it at work. One is a photograph of a single day. The other is a whole working life. Almost everyone has been lonely at work at some point, and that is what 82% is measuring. About a fifth of people were lonely yesterday, and that is what 22% is measuring.
It is a small habit worth keeping for every statistic you meet: before you react to the number, find the question. We ran into exactly this reading the research on whether talking to AI makes you less lonely, where two studies appeared to contradict each other mostly because one measured a conversation and the other measured a year.
Where You Live Moves It More Than Where You Sit
The job-level gap is two points. The gap between regions is sixteen.
Gallup’s regional figures for daily loneliness at work run from 28% in South Asia and 28% in Sub-Saharan Africa down to 13% in Europe and 12% in Latin America and the Caribbean. East Asia sat at 23%. The Middle East and North Africa at 22%. Southeast Asia and North America both at 19%.
So if you wanted to guess whether someone felt lonely at work yesterday, knowing where they live would help you more than knowing their job title. Nobody has ever said “it’s lonely in South Asia,” and that number is both larger and better evidenced than the one everybody does say.
The Oldest Writing About Being Alone Was Not About Leaders
Which brings up something easy to miss.
The oldest writing we have on the subject of being alone does not begin with a leader at all. It begins with one person. No team, no title, nobody above or below. And the first thing in that account described as not good is not failure, or hunger, or danger. It is that the person is by himself. Being alone gets named as the problem before there is any organisation to be lonely at the top of.
Which makes a two-point gap look less like a surprise and more like the expected result. If the need for company was never issued with a rank attached, rank is not where you would expect to find it piled up. It would be spread fairly evenly, the way a need is.
The oldest answer on record says the need was built in rather than earned — that being by yourself was simply not how a person was meant to be. Call that God, or call it ancient wisdom; either way it put the need in the person and not in the position. We moved it to the position, and then used that as a reason to only ever check on one person in the building.
One Thing to Try This Week
None of this requires money, a programme, or permission from anyone.
- Ask one specific question instead of the general one. “How are you” has a reflex answer already loaded. “What was the hardest part of your week?” does not.
- Go first. People match the honesty level that is set for them. One true sentence about your own week does more than ten careful questions.
- Pick the person you would never think to ask. Not your manager, not the colleague you already talk to. The quiet one, the newest one, the one in another time zone who is always on mute.
And if you want a sense of where you are yourself before you go asking anybody else, our free How Lonely Am I? assessment takes about two minutes, and nobody sees the result but you.
A Question Worth Sitting With
Do you think “it’s lonely at the top” has survived because it is true, or because it quietly gives everyone else permission not to ask? Tell us which one you think it is in the comments below — we read them.
Share This
- Turns out “it’s lonely at the top” is nearly a myth. Managers: 23% daily loneliness. Everyone else: 21%. A two-point gap. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bgodinspired-news/bgodinspired-business-news/is-it-lonely-at-the-top/
- Gallup split daily feelings at work by job level. Stress: managers 45%, everyone else 39%. Loneliness: 23% and 21%. Sadness: 23% and 23%, dead level. The top is harder — but the old line picked the wrong word for it. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bgodinspired-news/bgodinspired-business-news/is-it-lonely-at-the-top/
- One survey says 22% of workers are lonely. Another says 82%. Both are right, because one asked “yesterday” and the other asked “ever”. Best habit to pick up this year: before you react to a number, find the question. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bgodinspired-news/bgodinspired-business-news/is-it-lonely-at-the-top/
Q&A
Is it really lonely at the top?
Barely. Gallup’s global workplace report, built on 2025 survey data, found that 23% of managers felt loneliness a lot of the previous day, compared with 21% of individual contributors. That is a two-point gap, not the chasm the phrase “it’s lonely at the top” suggests. Managers do report a much larger gap on stress: 45% against 39%.
What percentage of employees feel lonely at work?
Worldwide, 22% of employees told Gallup they had felt loneliness a lot of the previous day, based on 2025 survey data. The figure was 22% in 2024 and 20% in 2023, so it rose by two points and has since held flat. Surveys asking whether people have ever felt lonely at work return far higher numbers — an EY survey of more than 5,000 workers put that at 82% — because a lifetime question and a yesterday question measure different things.
Are managers lonelier than their employees?
Only slightly. In Gallup’s 2025 data, managers reported 23% daily loneliness and individual contributors 21%. The differences are larger for other feelings: managers reported more daily stress (45% versus 39%) and more anger (25% versus 21%), while sadness was identical for both groups at 23%. Managers were also slightly more engaged at work, 22% against 19%.
Which parts of the world have the most workplace loneliness?
In Gallup’s regional breakdown, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa were highest at 28% each, followed by East Asia at 23% and the Middle East and North Africa at 22%. Southeast Asia and North America were at 19%, post-Soviet Eurasia 16%, Australia and New Zealand 14%, Europe 13%, and Latin America and the Caribbean lowest at 12%. The spread between regions is far wider than the gap between job levels.
Is workplace loneliness getting worse?
Not over the most recent two years of global data. Gallup recorded 20% of employees feeling loneliness a lot of the previous day in 2023, 22% in 2024, and 22% again in 2025. That is an increase followed by a plateau, which is a different pattern from the accelerating crisis the subject is usually described as. A fifth of the global workforce is still a very large number of people.
