Office romances aren’t disappearing, but the people in them are getting better at hiding them from just about everyone. New research from SHRM finds 56% of U.S. workers have kept a workplace romance secret from their own team, 49% hid one from their manager, and 45% concealed one from HR entirely, according to SHRM’s own published research.
Key Points
- 56% of workers hid a workplace romance from their teammates; 49% hid one from their manager; 45% kept one from HR.
- 48% of U.S. workers say employees have a moral responsibility to disclose a workplace relationship when it creates a conflict of interest; 49% of HR professionals agree.
- Findings come from separate SHRM surveys of 1,243 U.S. workers and 1,553 HR professionals, both fielded in December 2025.
What stands out isn’t that people keep office relationships quiet from coworkers — that’s been true for years. It’s that concealment extends almost as strongly upward, to managers, and even to HR, the department specifically set up to handle exactly this kind of disclosure. Nearly half of workers are keeping the people whose job it is to manage conflict-of-interest risk completely in the dark.
That secrecy sits awkwardly next to the second finding: roughly half of both workers and HR professionals believe there’s a moral obligation to disclose a relationship once it creates a genuine conflict of interest, such as one partner supervising the other or influencing their pay and promotions. Belief in the principle is nearly universal at the halfway mark. Actually acting on it, judging by the concealment numbers, is far less common.
SHRM President and CEO Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. addressed the gap directly in the organization’s release, saying it’s “essential for organizations to set clear expectations, promote transparency and fairness, offer practical training, and cultivate environments where business and personal connections thrive.” That framing puts the responsibility partly on employers to build policies people actually feel safe using, rather than treating the secrecy as purely a matter of individual employees choosing not to disclose.
The practical risk shows up in exactly the scenarios disclosure policies exist to prevent: a manager unknowingly evaluating a direct report they’re also dating, or a team dynamic quietly warped by a relationship nobody official knows about. With secrecy running this deep even toward HR, the gap between “people believe disclosure matters” and “people actually disclose” looks less like a policy failure and more like a trust problem — one that isn’t likely to close until workplaces make the cost of coming forward lower than the cost of staying quiet.
