Nearly half of U.S. employees, 47%, say they’ve dated a coworker at some point in their career, according to new research from the Society for Human Resource Management. The same data shows most of them didn’t tell everyone at work about it.
SHRM’s annual workplace romance research, drawn from a survey of 1,243 U.S. workers fielded in December 2025, found that 56% of employees who’ve had a workplace relationship kept it hidden from at least their team, 49% concealed it from managers, and 45% never told HR.
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The secrecy persists despite a meaningful share of workers believing disclosure is the right thing to do under certain circumstances. Forty-eight percent of employees said workers have a moral duty to report a workplace romance when it creates a potential conflict of interest, per the same research. Among HR professionals surveyed separately, 49% agreed, while 30% disagreed.
Key Points
- 47% of employees have dated a coworker at some point.
- 56% of those employees hid the relationship from at least their team.
- 48% of workers say disclosure is a moral duty when a conflict of interest exists.
General comfort with office romance has also cooled. Fifty-seven percent of workers said they feel comfortable with colleagues dating each other, down sharply from 81% who said the same in SHRM’s prior research. HR professionals were surveyed separately for the new report, with 1,553 responding between December 4 and 9, 2025, through SHRM’s Voice of Work Research Panel.
Remote and hybrid arrangements complicate the picture further. Thirty-nine percent of hybrid and remote workers said their setup limits their opportunities to meet a romantic partner through work, while 37% disagreed, according to SHRM’s findings.
“Workplace romances aren’t going anywhere. They’re woven into our professional lives,” said Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., SHRM’s president and CEO, in the organization’s announcement of the findings.
The gap between how common office relationships are and how rarely they’re disclosed leaves most companies relying on policy language and informal trust rather than any real visibility into who is actually dating whom.
The split over moral duty is notable in its own right. Nearly half of workers and roughly half of HR professionals agree that some romances should be disclosed, yet the concealment numbers suggest that belief rarely translates into action once a relationship actually starts. Fear of gossip, career fallout or an awkward HR conversation appears to outweigh the sense of obligation for most couples.
SHRM’s research treats the two survey groups, employees and HR professionals, as separate populations rather than mirror images of each other, which is why their answers on moral duty and comfort with office dating don’t line up perfectly. The overall pattern nonetheless points the same direction: workplace romance remains common, but openness about it is becoming rarer, not more normalized, as comfort with the idea of colleagues dating has fallen sharply since SHRM’s prior survey.
