Australians among most stressed globally as sadness at work rises, Gallup report finds

Australians are among the most stressed workers in the world and a growing number also feel sad, angry and emotionally drained on a daily basis, according to major new study.

Gallup’s newly released State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, which draws on fresh data from more than 140 countries, paints a sobering picture of work life in Australia.

The research reveals half of workers report experiencing daily stress with one in five also reporting sadness as employee engagement has fallen to its lowest level since before the pandemic.

Gallup’s Australia country-level data show half of Australian employees experience daily stress, which is on par with the most stressed workforces in the world, in the United States and Canada.

In Australia, 21 per cent of workers reported sadness a lot of the previous day, 15 per cent reported anger and 14 per cent reported loneliness.

Gallup says the percentage of employees globally who report experiencing “a lot of stress, anger or sadness the previous day remains above pre-pandemic levels”, with the daily negative emotions that surged during Covid still not returning to where they were before 2020.

Gallup said that suggested either “lasting psychological impacts or a new, more challenging status quo”.

In Australia, the trajectory is clear with the workforce carrying a much heavier emotional load than it did a decade ago.

Daily sadness has almost doubled from 12 per cent in 2010 to 21 per cent in 2025.

Daily stress has risen from 34 per cent in 2010 to 50 per cent in 2025.

Anger has edged up from 14 per cent in 2010 to 15 per cent in 2025, while loneliness is now at 14 per cent.

This comes amid record-low employee engagement, with just 21 per cent of Australian employees feeling engaged at work.

Conversely, 66 per cent of workers say they are not engaged and 13 per cent are actively disengaged.

Brand Rebellion partner David Campbell said the statistics reveal a workforce in crisis.

“What we are seeing is not just classic burnout,” he said.

“Work is becoming more cognitively demanding at the same time that life outside work is becoming more instant and always on.

“AI is helping remove some of the repetitive work, but it is also concentrating more of people’s time in high-focus, high-load tasks.

“The risk is that people never really come off, either at work or at home.”

Mr Campbell — who specialises in the design, development and implementation of workforce planning, strategy and people solutions — said Australians have been operating at a sustained pace for too long, with too little real recovery time.

“I think a big part of it is that people have been operating at a constant pace for a long time now, with very little real downtime,” he said.

“Workloads are high, expectations around productivity have lifted, and outside of work people are still living in an always-on environment.

“Everything is instant, on demand and accessible, so there is less of a natural break between work, life and recovery.”

The experienced organisation and workforce practitioner said that was changing not only how employees feel, but how work itself is experienced.

“I do think burnout is part of the story, but it reflects something broader as well. Work itself is being experienced differently now,” he said.

“One of the factors is AI. In many roles, AI is taking away some of the mundane, repetitive or lower-cognitive tasks that used to give people a natural change of pace during the day.

“What that leaves is more of the high-cognitive, strategic and problem-solving work.

“That sounds positive in theory, but in practice it means people are spending more of their day under sustained cognitive load. There is less time on cruise control and more time in constant mental effort.”

Mr Campbell said this is a ”work design issue”.

“If work is becoming more cognitively intense, more immediate and more always-on, then organisations cannot treat wellbeing as something separate from the job itself,” he said.

“Flexibility, EAPs and wellbeing initiatives all matter, but they do not solve the underlying problem if workloads are relentless, recovery time is limited, and people are constantly operating in high-pressure mode.”

The Gallup report also suggests broader structural issues.

Globally, lower engagement among managers accounted for most of the recent downturn in employee engagement, with manager engagement dropping nine points since 2022.

Gallup says that “lower engagement among managers accounts for most of the recent downturn in employee engagement” and argues managers remain critical not only to engagement, but to the adoption of AI and to the emotional experience of work.

Mr Campbell said that made middle managers one of the biggest pressure points to watch.

“Over the next 12 months, one of the biggest watchpoints for organisations will be whether managers can spot the signs of people becoming overwhelmed early,” he said.

“Often the first signals are not dramatic. It shows up in quality of work, energy, engagement and how people are interacting with the organisation.

“If that goes unchecked, the risk becomes burnout, disengagement and ultimately turnover.”

Clinical psychologist Amanda Gordon urged caution about reading the numbers too simplistically.

“It may not be that work is causing them to be sad or angry, but it may be that we have lost the capacity to separate work from home, and therefore we bring emotions into work that we’ve previously left away,” she said.

“I think the data reveals that people are angry and sad, but it’s not causal. It’s not that the workplace has made them angry and sad.

“The people I speak to will not say anything specific about work, except they would prefer not to have to be there in the office. They think there are better ways of spending their days than doing the things they are asked to do at work, especially those who do not see the value of their work within the big context.”

The presenter and author said the after-effects of the pandemic, especially the shift to remote work and the rocky transition back, were still shaping how many people feel about work.

“During the pandemic, there were so many reasons, and you certainly couldn’t blame workplaces for the reasons that people felt sad and angry during the pandemic,” she said.

“I don’t think you can blame workplaces, except for poor transitioning back, poor explanations, making people feel like they weren’t trusted (to work from home) and they had to come back (to the office) because they weren’t working.”

Gordon argued that broader social anxiety was a likely contributor.

“I think people are distressed about money right now. I think people are feeling very anxious about petrol prices,” she said.

“They’re distracted by world events. They’re distracted by the lack of safety that many of us feel in our streets, where we used to feel safe . . . there’s a lot going on.”

In her view the Gallup data captures a workforce experiencing a combination of high stress, low engagement and elevated sadness at a time when work, home, technology, cost-of-living pressure and global instability are bleeding into one another.

The report also points to a complicated contradiction in the Australian workforce.

Australians are still relatively upbeat when asked to rate their lives overall but their day-to-day emotional experience at the time of polling told a different story.

Despite the stress and negative emotions, 55 per cent of Australian workers are classified as “thriving” in their overall lives, compared with 34 per cent globally.

On the flipside, 42 per cent are “struggling” and 3 per cent are “suffering”.

The findings are based on Gallup’s World Poll, which surveys about 1000 people in each country annually using probability-based, nationally representative samples collected from January to December 2025.