Conversation starter: Honeymoons and hangovers for job switchers
Chris Martin
Senior Economist | Feb 17, 2026
Key Findings:
- Glassdoor users who switch employers after a negative review give much higher ratings in their new jobs. Average reviews rise from 1.5 to 3.7, with 41% giving 5-stars to their new employers.
- After the “honeymoon” phase, these workers remain much happier in their new jobs more than one year after their initial ratings. The average third rating is 3.3, a marked increase.
- While these workers see improvements, they still tend to be worse-off than Glassdoor users who followed the same employment pattern but were happy with their initial roles. These workers may have been willing to take less promising roles when leaving their old situations or they could just be harsher critics.
Workers who start a new job enjoy a period of elevated satisfaction, but that initial excitement wears off. Psychologists who study this workplace call this pattern the “honeymoon-hangover effect.” Our previous research showed how workers who leave a job they hate are much more satisfied with their new roles, but does this newfound satisfaction last? There’s also the contrast effect bias, where the new role may be rated well because it’s so much better than the old one. As time passes, this bias should wear off as the comparison to the prior employer is no longer at the forefront of the worker’s experience. Our data show these effects, with ratings higher after joining a new role and then falling. For workers who leave an employer after a negative review, they still rate the hangover better than the jobs they hated and left.
Dissatisfied workers enjoy a lasting improvement in their new roles
To see whether quitting a job you hate leads to longer-term improvements in job satisfaction, we needed to find workers whose Glassdoor review profiles fit a very specific pattern:
- the user gives a low rating of their employer,
- the user’s next rating comes from a different employer, and
- the user leaves another rating from the new employer
The new data show that dissatisfied workers find lasting improvements in their new roles. The honeymoon beats the hangover for most of these workers, with 69% giving ratings of 3 or higher in their final rating.
The honeymoon phase is the most positive for these workers, with 41% giving 5-star ratings to their new roles and 23% giving 4-star ratings. We do see a honeymoon-hangover effect, though, as ratings fall in the subsequent ratings at the same employer: now, 28% give 5-star ratings and 21% give 4-star ratings. Many workers have fallen back to 1-star (17%) or 2-star (14%) ratings, but a strong majority of workers give better ratings to their new employers even after the honeymoon fades.
Satisfied workers leave for better roles
Workers can be choosy when voluntarily leaving their companies for new roles. Dissatisfied workers may be more willing to take a chance, but workers who love their roles are likely to demand more from their next roles if they’re going to make the change. In the following diagram, we present the results of workers who follow the same pattern of reviews & employment, but who gave positive ratings to their initial employer.
Some of these workers were unhappy with their new employer, but most (87%) gave 4- or 5-star ratings to their new workers. A slightly higher proportion gave 5-star ratings, which rose from 57% of this group’s ratings in their first jobs to 50% in the first rating of the new job. These workers also experienced hangovers after their honeymoons, however, with 46% giving 5-star ratings and 30% giving 4-star ratings.
In the hangover phase, average ratings for workers who left jobs they liked were 4.1 vs. 3.3 for workers who left jobs they disliked. Two things are happening at the same time here. The initial negative reviewers may just be harsher critics of their jobs or more demanding, and positive reviewers can demand better offers to leave a role they love.
Conclusion
Our initial research found that most workers who switched roles tended to trade up, especially for those who were dissatisfied with their jobs. The implication is that you should leave a job you hate, but this follow-up research further explores two potential psychological effects: the honeymoon-hangover effect (new jobs are extra nice at the beginning, but the novelty wears off) and the contrast effect (you might give higher ratings because a new job is better than your last one, but you would rate it differently if you liked your previous role better).
By extending our research to three ratings following a specific pattern, we can see that Glassdoor ratings do follow a honeymoon-hangover pattern - but that employees still rate the hangover better than their previous jobs.
Methodology
We identified Glassdoor users who provided multiple reviews in the 2018-2025 window. For each user, we chose three consecutive reviews that were no more than three years apart and followed the specific employment pattern needed to test for the honeymoon-hangover effect: switching employers between the first and second review, and leaving two reviews from the new employer. We included those who left positive (4- or 5-star) and negative (1- or 2-star) ratings at their first employer, yielding 40,563 unique reviews from 13,521 users. On average, reviews were 18 months apart.
Chris Martin
Chris Martin is a senior economist on Glassdoor's Economic Research team. His research has focused on employee engagement, workplace equity and compensation, and has been featured in The Financial Times, Politico, Harvard Business Review, and more. Prior to joining Glassdoor, Chris was a researcher at Syndio and PayScale, and a senior manager of analytics on the inclusion and diversity team at Starbucks. He holds a Master's in Economics from the University of Washington and a Bachelor's in Political Science from Utah State University.
