A holiday bonus — or any annual bonus, for that matter — soon could be going away.
ADP Research, an arm of the management services company ADP, analyzed six years of ADP payroll data to determine whether bonus payouts are increasing in size and whether more employees are receiving them. The result? Bonuses are becoming less common.
“Less than half of U.S. workers receive a bonus each year, and the share of workers receiving these pay perks has been falling since 2021. In 2024, fewer than 40% of workers received a bonus,” according to Jeff Nezaj, ADP’s director of data analytics. “The median bonus payout for all U.S. workers has been shrinking, too, falling to $1,786 in 2024 from $1,857 a year earlier. In 2024, payouts ranged from no bonus at all to a high of $50 million.”
The anonymized research sample contained data on approximately 12 million workers at employers with 50 or more people on the payroll from December 2019 through December 2024. The majority of bonuses were given in December (13%), followed by November and January (9% each).
Bonuses peaked in 2021, when 44% of employees received one, according to the research, with the largest increase in bonuses between 2019 and 2021 happening in the health care sector.
“At the time, employers were offering bonuses to attract frontline health workers during the pandemic’s public health crisis,” Nezaj noted. “Since 2021, the percentage of employees receiving a bonus has gotten smaller but remains greater than it was before the pandemic.”
In 2024, 51% of construction and manufacturing employees received a bonus, the largest share of any sector, he added, while education professionals fared the worst, with only 18.6% receiving a bonus.
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