Ask most people what matters most about a job and salary tends to top the list without much debate. New survey data suggests that answer is more complicated than it looks. According to KPMG’s 2025 Friends at Work survey of 1,019 full-time professionals, 57% of employees said they would rather take a job paying 10% below market rate that came with close workplace friendships than one paying 10% above market with none. That is effectively a 20-point pay swing that people are willing to absorb for connection. It arrives alongside a second, less comfortable finding: workplace loneliness has nearly doubled in a single year.
The Friendship Premium
KPMG’s framing of that 57% figure is deliberate. Researchers did not just ask people whether friendships at work were nice to have. They forced a direct trade-off between two hypothetical jobs, one with better pay and no close friends, one with worse pay and real ones, and a majority of respondents chose the friends. That is what KPMG calls a “20% salary premium” on workplace connection, according to the report. For an industry that has spent years assuming compensation is the lever that moves retention and satisfaction, that is a hard number to ignore.
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Loneliness Nearly Doubled in a Year
The number that explains why this trade-off exists at all is the isolation data. KPMG found that 45% of employees now say they feel isolated and alone at work at least sometimes, up from just 25% in November 2024, according to the same survey. That is not a slow drift. It is close to a doubling in roughly a year, and it lines up with a workplace that has grown more remote, more distributed, and in a lot of cases more transactional than it was even two years ago.
Some groups are feeling it more sharply than others. Remote workers report the highest isolation of any group KPMG measured, at 67%, alongside employees in telecommunications, media, and tech, who sit at 65%. Men now report higher workplace isolation than women too, at 48% versus 42%, which KPMG notes is a striking reversal given how much workplace loneliness has historically skewed toward women in prior research. Sandy Torchia, KPMG’s U.S. Vice Chair of Talent and Culture, summed up the disconnect in the firm’s own release: “We’re witnessing a friendship mirage in the workplace: universal connection on the surface, increasing loneliness underneath,” according to KPMG.
Why People Are Willing to Trade Pay for Proximity
It helps to think about what a close work friendship actually does for someone’s day. It is the person who covers for you without being asked, who makes a bad meeting bearable, who notices when something is off before you say a word. Salary buys stability. Friendship buys the texture of the actual hours you spend at your desk, and apparently, for a majority of workers, that texture is worth real money. It is worth remembering, too, that this is not a soft or sentimental finding buried in an HR slide deck. It came from a direct financial trade-off that over half of respondents chose without hesitation.
What Employers Are Getting Wrong
The gap between those two numbers, 57% valuing friendship over pay and 45% feeling isolated anyway, points to a mismatch most workplaces have not caught up to. Companies have spent the past several years investing heavily in remote flexibility, digital collaboration tools, and hybrid schedules that employees genuinely wanted. What a lot of those same companies have not replaced is the informal social infrastructure that used to come free with a physical office: the lunch table, the hallway run-in, the desk five feet away. You can build flexibility and still lose connection if nothing intentional fills that gap.
The Bottom Line
Salary still matters, and nobody in this data is arguing that pay is irrelevant. But when a majority of employees say they would give up a meaningful chunk of it for real friendships at work, and when isolation has nearly doubled in the space of a year, the story is no longer just about compensation. It is about what work is actually for, and how much of that got lost somewhere between the office and the laptop screen.
