Nearly half of U.S. workers — 47% — are currently in or have previously been in a workplace romance, according to SHRM’s newest workplace romance research. That figure hasn’t shifted much from prior years. What has shifted, sharply, is how safe people feel admitting it exists at all: comfort with colleagues dating each other fell from 81% to 57% in a single year, a nearly 24-point drop that dwarfs the normal year-over-year movement in SHRM’s workplace culture tracking. The dating didn’t slow down. The willingness to be open about it did.
Secrecy was already the norm before comfort collapsed
Before this year’s comfort numbers even cratered, hiding a relationship was already standard practice. SHRM found 56% of workers have concealed a workplace relationship from their team, 49% have hidden one from their direct manager, and 45% have kept one from HR entirely. Those aren’t people avoiding gossip for a week or two — that’s nearly half the workforce actively managing what their employer and colleagues know about their personal life, sometimes for the duration of an entire relationship.
That baseline matters for reading the comfort drop correctly. It’s not that people suddenly discovered office romance is common — 47% has been the reality for a while. It’s that the social contract around acknowledging it just got a lot less forgiving, and workers who were already hiding relationships now have even less incentive to stop.
Why the number moved so fast
SHRM’s data points to a workforce recalibrating its risk tolerance rather than its behavior. A near-even split shows why the stakes feel higher: 48% of U.S. workers now believe employees have a moral responsibility to disclose a workplace romance under certain circumstances, and HR professionals are almost exactly as split — 49% agree there’s a disclosure obligation, while 30% actively disagree. When nearly half of the workforce believes silence is itself a violation, “comfortable with coworkers dating” stops meaning “fine if it happens” and starts meaning “fine only if it’s handled exactly right” — a much narrower, much more anxious version of comfort.
Remote and hybrid work compounds the pressure rather than easing it. SHRM found 39% of remote or hybrid employees agree their work arrangement makes it harder to meet a romantic partner in the first place, against 37% who disagree — a near-dead-even split that suggests physical distance hasn’t killed office romance so much as made the relationships that do form feel more exposed once they’re disclosed, since there are fewer casual, ambient interactions to normalize a couple simply existing in the same building.
HR itself hasn’t agreed on the rules
Part of what’s driving the anxiety is that the rulebook varies wildly by employer. SHRM’s research found just over one-third of organizations have clear, structured policies governing workplace relationships, 30% handle each situation case-by-case, and 20% have no formal policy at all. That means a fifth of the workforce is navigating disclosure decisions with zero institutional guidance, while another third is guessing what “case-by-case” will mean for them specifically if it ever comes up.
SHRM-SCP President and CEO Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. addressed the gap directly in the organization’s release, noting “it’s essential for organizations to set clear expectations, promote transparency and fairness, offer practical training.” The word “essential” is doing real work there — with two-thirds of organizations lacking a clear, consistent policy, most employees are left guessing what the consequences of disclosure actually are, and guessing tends to push people toward silence rather than risk.
What the numbers add up to
Put the three findings together and a clearer pattern emerges than “office romance is dying.” Nearly half the workforce has dated a coworker. More than half of that group already hides it. And now, over a single year, the number of people willing to say dating a colleague is fine at all dropped by almost a quarter. That’s not workers losing interest in each other — SHRM’s own data on prevalence hasn’t moved. It’s the social and institutional cost of being open about it rising faster than most companies’ policies have caught up, which means the relationships aren’t disappearing so much as retreating further from view.
SHRM’s findings come from two concurrent December 2025 surveys: 1,243 U.S. workers surveyed December 8 and 1,553 HR professionals surveyed December 4–9.
