Is Job Insecurity the New Leading Cause of Workplace Stress?

Fifty-four percent of US workers now say job insecurity significantly affects their stress levels, according to the APA’s 2025 Work and Well-being Survey, up sharply from a year earlier. Layered on top of that is a genuinely new driver: 69% of workers believe AI will lead to layoffs at their company within three years, and 49% fear personally losing their job to AI tools and automation, according to a 2026 Modern Health report. Workload has long been the default answer to “what stresses employees out most.” In 2026, job insecurity is closing that gap fast, and AI anxiety is a meaningful part of why.

So is job insecurity now the leading cause of workplace stress? The honest answer is that it’s rivaling workload as a top driver, and it’s doing so in a genuinely new form, not simply the recession-era fear of past downturns, but a distinct anxiety shaped by AI disruption, visible restructuring, and a widening gap between employer messaging and what employees actually see happening.

The Scale of the Shift

Multiple independent 2025–2026 surveys converge on the same pattern:

• Workload remains a leading driver, cited by roughly 35 to 41% of employees depending on the survey, but job insecurity now sits close behind, cited by around 54% of US workers as a significant stress factor, according to APA data.
• Concern about an economic downturn costing someone their job within the year rose to 44%, up from 36% the year before.
• AI-specific fear has climbed sharply: global worker concern about AI-driven job loss rose from 28% in 2024 to 40% in 2026, according to Mercer, while separate Pew Research data puts general worker worry about AI’s workplace impact at 52%.
• Among senior managers specifically, pressure is even more acute: 80% say AI has increased expectations of their output, and 74% expect AI-driven layoffs within their own company.

That last point is worth pausing on, because it cuts against the assumption that job insecurity is mainly an entry-level or blue-collar concern. Anxiety is climbing across seniority levels, including among the managers organizations often expect to be a stabilizing presence for everyone below them.

The Fear-Reality Gap Is Real, and It Matters

Here’s where the data gets genuinely interesting: the fear of AI-driven layoffs is significantly outpacing AI’s actual, attributed role in job cuts, at least so far. Challenger, Gray & Christmas data shows AI was cited as a factor in roughly 4.5% of US layoffs in 2025, rising to about 13% by early 2026, and reaching 25% in March 2026, the first month AI ranked as the number one cited cause. That’s a real and rapidly accelerating trend, but it’s still well below the 69% of workers who believe AI-driven layoffs are coming to their company specifically.

Separate Gallup research adds an unexpected wrinkle: workers who don’t use AI regularly have actually made up a larger share of recent layoffs than AI users, with 62% of laid-off workers found to be infrequent or non-users, while only 1% of respondents cited AI or automation directly as their reason for job loss. Most cuts are still being attributed to organizational restructuring and role elimination broadly, not a clean, direct AI substitution story.

This gap matters for how organizations should respond. Job insecurity right now is being driven less by AI actually eliminating specific roles at scale today, and more by uncertainty itself: employees can see AI capability advancing quickly, watch layoff headlines cite it as a factor with increasing frequency, and reasonably conclude their own role could be next, even when the more immediate cause of workforce reduction is something else entirely. Anxiety driven by uncertainty is genuinely harder to manage than anxiety driven by a specific, named threat, because there’s no clear fix to point to.

Why This Stress Is Different From Past Waves of Job Insecurity

Recession-era job insecurity was typically tied to a visible, external economic event; people understood roughly why layoffs were happening and could point to a downturn as the cause. The current wave is compounding several distinct pressures at once. AI is simultaneously described as a productivity tool and a layoff driver, sometimes by the same company in the same quarter, which erodes trust in how employers talk about it at all. Sixty-seven percent of employees say AI has increased their productivity expectations, and of that group, 64% report increased stress directly tied to those expectations, meaning even employees who aren’t worried about being replaced are absorbing more pressure from the tools meant to make their jobs easier.

Trust in employer intentions is also visibly eroding alongside this. Seventy-two percent of employees now believe employers prioritize productivity over employee wellbeing, up from 61% just a year earlier. That’s a meaningful year-over-year shift, and it suggests the stress isn’t purely about job loss itself; it’s compounded by a growing sense that the organization’s stated concern for wellbeing doesn’t match its actual priorities during a period of genuine uncertainty.

What Actually Helps

The research points toward a fairly consistent set of interventions, none of which require pretending the uncertainty doesn’t exist.

Transparent, honest communication beats reassurance that doesn’t hold up. Employees can tell the difference between genuine information and vague reassurance, and given how much of the current anxiety is driven by uncertainty rather than a confirmed threat, clear, honest communication about what AI adoption actually means for specific roles tends to reduce anxiety more effectively than blanket statements that jobs are safe, especially when those statements later prove inaccurate.

Structural changes reduce stress more reliably than individual resilience programs. Research consistently shows demographic and role-based patterns, lower-autonomy roles report higher chronic stress, for example, meaning organizations get more traction addressing role clarity, control, and communication directly than by offering coping tools alone for a threat rooted in structural uncertainty.

Reskilling support addresses the actual underlying fear better than messaging alone. Since much of the current anxiety is about relevance and adaptability rather than a specific, imminent layoff, genuine investment in reskilling and internal mobility gives employees something concrete to do with their concern, rather than leaving them to sit with uncertainty they have no way to act on.

Manager support matters more when the manager is also under pressure. With senior managers reporting some of the highest AI-related stress themselves, supporting managers directly, not just asking them to reassure their teams, is essential; a stressed, uncertain manager is poorly positioned to model calm for anyone else.

This is exactly where a genuine corporate wellness strategy needs to expand beyond its traditional scope. Addressing job insecurity as a core wellness issue, alongside burnout and financial stress, rather than treating it as purely a communications or change-management problem, reflects how directly it’s now driving measurable stress and disengagement. Some organizations are working with a specialized corporate wellness company to build the kind of structured, honest communication and reskilling support that actually reduces this specific form of anxiety, since generic wellness messaging tends to ring hollow against a backdrop of genuine, headline-driven uncertainty about AI and restructuring.

According to Mr. Amit Kapoor, Founder of Balanz & Beonn, employee wellbeing today must address not just burnout, but also uncertainty, job security, and AI-driven stress.

The Bottom Line

Is job insecurity the new leading cause of workplace stress? It’s close enough to workload that the distinction is becoming less meaningful, and the AI-driven version of this anxiety is genuinely new, shaped as much by uncertainty and eroding trust as by any confirmed, widespread job loss so far. The gap between fear and current reality is real and worth naming honestly, but that gap itself is part of the problem: uncertainty this pervasive doesn’t resolve on its own, and employees are unlikely to feel reassured by messaging that doesn’t match what they’re actually seeing in the headlines. Organizations that address this directly, with honest communication, real reskilling investment, and genuine support for the managers absorbing pressure from both directions, are far better positioned than those hoping the anxiety quietly fades once the AI news cycle moves on.