Phishing Reporting Rate Benchmarks by Industry: How Many Employees Actually Flag Suspicious Emails?

Every security awareness program tracks phishing click rates. Far fewer track reporting rates—the percentage of employees who identify a suspicious email and actively report it to the security team. That gap is a strategic mistake.

Click rate measures avoidance behavior: whether employees can recognize and refrain from clicking on phishing attempts. Reporting rate measures active participation in organizational defense: whether employees see security as something they contribute to rather than something that happens to them.

The difference matters enormously. An organization where 15 percent of employees click phishing simulations but only 8 percent report them is fundamentally different from an organization with the same 15 percent click rate but a 35 percent reporting rate. The first organization has employees who passively try not to make mistakes. The second has employees who actively participate in collective security.

Industry benchmarks for reporting rates reveal which sectors have successfully built that reporting culture—and which have not. This guide provides detailed reporting rate data across major industries, explains the structural factors that drive variation, and offers a framework for interpreting your organization's reporting performance against sector peers.

What Reporting Rate Actually Measures

Before examining benchmarks, it is worth clarifying exactly what the reporting rate metric captures and what it does not.

Reporting rate in the context of phishing simulation is the percentage of simulation recipients who identify the simulated phishing email as suspicious and submit it through the organization's reporting mechanism—typically a "Report Phishing" button in the email client, a forwarding address, or a security platform reporting interface.

This metric is distinct from click rate, which measures the percentage who clicked; distinct from credential submission rate, which measures the percentage who entered credentials on a fake login page; and distinct from the rate of employees who simply deleted the email without reporting it. An employee who recognizes a phishing simulation as suspicious and deletes it without clicking has avoided the immediate threat but has not contributed to the organization's collective defense by reporting it.

The reporting rate metric is inherently conservative. It undercounts true detection because it only captures employees who both recognize the threat and take the additional action of reporting it. Employees who recognize the email as suspicious but choose not to report it—because they assume others have already reported it, because they do not trust that reporting makes a difference, or simply because reporting feels like extra work—are not captured in this metric despite having successfully identified the threat.

This conservatism is deliberate. The goal of a phishing awareness program is not merely to produce employees who can spot phishing when they encounter it, but to produce employees who actively escalate suspicious communications to the security team so that novel threats can be identified and blocked organization-wide before they cause damage.

Healthcare: Low Baseline, High Variability

Healthcare organizations show some of the lowest average phishing reporting rates across industry benchmarks, with typical rates in the 6 to 12 percent range for organizations without mature reporting programs.

The factors that drive healthcare's elevated phishing click rates—large, occupationally diverse workforces with limited security training and high time pressure—also suppress reporting behavior. Clinical staff who are barely keeping pace with patient care demands are unlikely to take the additional step of reporting a suspicious email they successfully avoided clicking. The immediate task of patient care takes precedence over the abstract collective benefit of reporting.

Healthcare organizations also face a cultural challenge around reporting that is distinct from most other sectors. In clinical environments, reporting mechanisms are strongly associated with incident reporting, error disclosure, and quality management systems—contexts that carry professional and sometimes legal consequences. Asking clinical staff to "report" suspicious emails activates the same psychological associations as incident reporting, creating friction that other sectors do not face.

Despite these structural barriers, healthcare organizations that invest deliberately in building reporting culture can achieve substantial improvement. Programs that emphasize the positive framing of reporting—presenting it as protecting colleagues and patients rather than disclosing mistakes—and that provide frictionless reporting mechanisms directly integrated into email workflows have demonstrated the ability to raise reporting rates into the 20 to 30 percent range within twelve to eighteen months.

The variation within healthcare is larger than in most other sectors. Academic medical centers with research missions and technology-forward cultures often achieve reporting rates significantly above the healthcare average, while small community hospitals and rural practices typically fall below it. The difference reflects not employee capability but organizational investment in security culture.

Financial Services: Moderate Reporting, Process-Driven Culture

Financial services organizations typically show reporting rates in the 12 to 22 percent range, positioning the sector in the middle of industry benchmarks despite having relatively low click rates.

The disconnect between financial services' strong click rate performance and moderate reporting rate performance reflects the sector's process-oriented security culture. Employees in financial services organizations are well-trained to avoid risky behavior—clicking suspicious links, entering credentials on unverified sites, downloading unexpected attachments—but less consistently trained to take the additional proactive step of reporting.

This pattern suggests that many financial services security awareness programs have successfully taught employees "what not to do" but have been less successful in teaching "what to do when you encounter a threat." The result is a workforce that is relatively good at avoiding individual compromise but less effective at contributing to collective threat intelligence.

Financial services organizations that prioritize reporting culture—through executive messaging that frames reporting as professional competence rather than extra work, through streamlined reporting workflows, and through visible security team responsiveness to employee reports—have demonstrated the ability to push reporting rates into the 30 to 40 percent range. At those levels, the organization begins to achieve genuine early warning capability, with employees identifying novel phishing campaigns before they scale to damage-producing levels.

The most sophisticated financial services security programs treat reporting rate as the primary KPI for security culture maturity, recognizing that employees who actively report threats are fundamentally more valuable to organizational defense than employees who merely avoid clicking them.

Technology: High Reporting Among Technical Staff, Lower Among Non-Technical Roles

Technology sector organizations show the highest average reporting rates across industry benchmarks, typically in the 18 to 28 percent range for organizations with active programs.

This elevated performance reflects several factors. Technology employees tend to have higher baseline security awareness, greater comfort with digital systems generally, and professional cultures that value identifying and escalating technical issues. Reporting a phishing email feels to many technology employees like the same category of behavior as reporting a software bug or a production incident—it is what you do when you identify a problem.

However, aggregate reporting rates for technology organizations often mask significant internal variation. Technical employees—engineers, security staff, product managers, data scientists—frequently report at rates of 35 to 50 percent or higher. Non-technical employees—sales, marketing, finance, legal, administrative staff—often report at rates closer to 10 to 15 percent.

This disparity creates a strategic blind spot. Attackers targeting technology organizations understand that engineers and security staff are difficult targets for generic phishing. They increasingly target the non-technical segments of technology workforces—particularly sales and business development staff who are accustomed to responding to external communications and who frequently have access to customer data, pricing information, and strategic partnership details.

Technology organizations that report only aggregate reporting rates without examining department-level breakdowns may significantly underestimate their vulnerability in the segments that attackers are most likely to target.

The solution is role-specific program design. Non-technical staff in technology organizations require reporting workflows and messaging that are designed for their work contexts rather than borrowed from engineering-focused security culture. When organizations invest in that tailored approach, non-technical employee reporting rates in technology companies can reach 25 to 35 percent—not as high as technical staff, but substantially higher than the default baseline.

Education: Cultural Barriers to Reporting

Educational institutions—K-12 districts, colleges, and universities—show reporting rates that are among the lowest in industry benchmarks, commonly in the 5 to 10 percent range for organizations without deliberate reporting culture programs.

Multiple factors converge to suppress reporting behavior in educational environments. Faculty culture in higher education often emphasizes autonomy and skepticism toward administrative processes, making top-down security directives—including requests to report suspicious emails—less culturally resonant than in corporate environments. K-12 teachers and staff operate under extreme time pressure with limited administrative support, making any additional task feel burdensome.

Student employees—a significant component of many university workforces—typically have minimal security training and high turnover, and they rarely develop the institutional commitment that would motivate proactive security reporting. Administrative staff in education face many of the same time-pressure challenges as healthcare clinical staff, with even fewer resources dedicated to security awareness.

The structural fragmentation of educational IT environments also creates reporting friction. Different departments, schools, or colleges within a university often have different reporting mechanisms, different security contacts, and different levels of IT support. An employee who encounters a suspicious email may not know where to report it or whether anyone will respond if they do.

Despite these challenges, educational institutions that build reporting culture deliberately—through simplified universal reporting mechanisms, through visible security team responsiveness that demonstrates reporting produces action, and through messaging that frames reporting as protecting the academic mission—have achieved reporting rates in the 15 to 25 percent range. That improvement requires sustained investment, but the gap between 8 percent and 20 percent reporting represents a fundamental shift in security posture.

Government and Public Sector: Compliance Culture, Variable Execution

Government and public sector reporting rates are highly variable, reflecting the diversity of the sector. Federal agencies with mature security programs and FISMA compliance mandates often achieve reporting rates in the 15 to 25 percent range. State and local government organizations without dedicated security awareness programs typically fall in the 5 to 12 percent range.

The variation is driven primarily by resource availability and regulatory pressure. Agencies subject to rigorous federal cybersecurity frameworks treat reporting rate as a compliance metric and invest accordingly. Smaller government organizations operating under budget constraints often lack the security awareness infrastructure to build effective reporting culture.

Government employees at all levels face a distinctive reporting friction: the perception that security teams are primarily enforcement mechanisms rather than support resources. In environments where IT policies are experienced as restrictive and punitive, employees are less likely to voluntarily engage with security teams by reporting suspicious emails.

Government organizations that successfully build high reporting rates tend to share several characteristics: executive leadership that visibly endorses reporting as expected professional behavior; security teams that respond to employee reports with acknowledgment and follow-up rather than silence; and streamlined reporting workflows that require minimal time or technical sophistication.

The compliance frameworks that drive government cybersecurity investment increasingly recognize reporting rate as a meaningful security culture indicator. The NIST Phish Scale method and federal cybersecurity performance goals now reference active threat reporting as a desired outcome, creating regulatory tailwinds for organizations that prioritize this metric.

Retail and Hospitality: Time Pressure and Turnover

Retail and hospitality organizations typically show reporting rates in the 8 to 16 percent range, reflecting the time-pressure and turnover challenges that also drive these sectors' elevated click rates.

Retail and hospitality employees—particularly frontline staff in stores, hotels, restaurants, and service environments—work in high-tempo customer-facing roles where taking time to report a suspicious email competes directly with immediate customer service demands. Reporting mechanisms that require employees to navigate unfamiliar systems or fill out forms are unlikely to be used consistently in these environments.

The most effective reporting mechanisms in retail and hospitality are those that require literally one click—a browser extension or email client button that submits the suspicious email without requiring the employee to take any additional action. Friction is the enemy of reporting behavior in time-constrained environments.

Seasonal staffing variation creates additional reporting rate challenges. During peak retail periods—holidays, back-to-school, major sales events—when staffing includes the highest proportion of recently onboarded employees, reporting rates predictably decline because new employees are less familiar with reporting mechanisms and less invested in organizational security culture.

Retail and hospitality organizations that achieve reporting rates above 15 percent almost universally do so through hyper-simplified reporting workflows and through visible acknowledgment of employee reports. When employees see that reporting produces action—when security teams respond to reports by sending follow-up communications thanking employees and explaining what was done—subsequent reporting rates improve. The feedback loop matters.

Professional Services: High Expectations, Moderate Execution

Professional services firms—law, accounting, consulting, architecture, engineering—typically show reporting rates in the 12 to 20 percent range, reflecting workforces with high baseline professional competence but limited time for administrative tasks.

Professional services employees are accustomed to identifying and escalating risks in their domain expertise—legal risks, financial risks, project risks—but often do not generalize that risk-escalation instinct to cybersecurity threats. The cultural norm of billable time creates implicit pressure against spending time on non-client activities, including reporting suspicious emails.

The highest-performing professional services firms deliberately counteract this pressure by treating security reporting as billable professional development or as explicitly approved non-billable time. When firm leadership makes clear that reporting suspicious emails is expected professional behavior that will not be scrutinized as wasted time, reporting rates improve substantially.

Professional services firms that handle highly sensitive client data—M&A law firms, forensic accounting practices, strategic consulting firms working on confidential transactions—face elevated targeting by sophisticated attackers who understand the value of compromising these environments. For these organizations, building high reporting rates is not merely a security metric optimization—it is a client service quality and professional liability issue.

What High Reporting Rates Actually Require

Industry benchmarks reveal substantial variation in reporting rates, but the variation is not random. Organizations with consistently high reporting rates—those achieving 30 percent or above—share several common program characteristics that distinguish them from organizations with low reporting rates.

Frictionless reporting mechanisms. High-reporting organizations make reporting as technically simple as possible. The dominant pattern is a one-click button integrated directly into the email client that submits the suspicious email to the security team without requiring the employee to take any additional action. Reporting mechanisms that require navigating to a separate portal, filling out a form, or copying and pasting email content create friction that substantially reduces reporting rates.

Visible security team responsiveness. Employees who report suspicious emails and receive no acknowledgment—who experience reporting as sending information into a void—are significantly less likely to report again. High-reporting organizations close the feedback loop by acknowledging every report, ideally with automated immediate acknowledgment and periodic follow-up that explains what action was taken. The acknowledgment does not need to be elaborate, but it needs to exist.

Executive endorsement of reporting as expected behavior. In organizations where reporting is framed as optional extra effort, reporting rates remain low. In organizations where executives and managers visibly frame reporting as expected professional behavior—as part of what it means to be a competent employee—reporting rates are substantially higher. The cultural signal matters more than the technical mechanism.

Positive framing that avoids blame. Organizations that position reporting as "catching employees' mistakes" rather than "employees protecting the organization" achieve lower reporting rates. The framing should emphasize contribution to collective security rather than individual error disclosure. Language matters: "Help us protect the team" produces more reporting than "Report if you clicked something you shouldn't have."

Protection from negative consequences. Employees who fear that reporting a suspicious email they interacted with will trigger disciplinary action or IT restrictions are less likely to report. High-reporting organizations explicitly communicate that reporting is encouraged regardless of whether the employee clicked, opened an attachment, or took other action, and that the goal is threat intelligence rather than enforcement.

Reporting Rate as Leading Indicator of Security Culture

The most strategically important distinction between click rate and reporting rate is temporal: click rate is a lagging indicator that measures whether harm was avoided after a threat arrived. Reporting rate is a leading indicator that measures whether the organization can identify and neutralize threats before they scale.

An employee who clicks a phishing link has already made the critical error by the time the click rate metric captures it. An employee who reports a phishing email before clicking provides the security team with the opportunity to identify the campaign, block the sender domain, warn other employees, and potentially prevent dozens or hundreds of subsequent attempts.

This is why mature security programs increasingly treat reporting rate as the primary culture metric rather than click rate. Reporting rate directly measures the behavior that produces organizational resilience: employees actively participating in threat detection rather than passively trying to avoid mistakes.

Industry benchmarks for reporting rate also show less compression than click rate benchmarks. While click rates across industries mostly fall within a 15 to 35 percent range, reporting rates span from below 5 percent to above 40 percent. That wider range means reporting rate benchmarks provide more differentiation for comparative performance assessment.

Organizations that achieve top-quartile reporting rates within their industry have fundamentally different security postures than organizations in the bottom quartile—not because their employees are inherently more security-aware, but because they have invested in the cultural and technical infrastructure that makes reporting the default employee response to suspicious communications.

Using Reporting Rate Benchmarks in Program Design

Understanding where your organization's reporting rate sits relative to industry benchmarks informs several specific program design decisions.

If your reporting rate is significantly below your industry benchmark, the primary intervention is usually reducing friction in the reporting mechanism and increasing the visibility of security team responsiveness. The barrier is rarely employee capability—it is almost always organizational process or culture.

If your reporting rate is at or slightly above your industry benchmark but still below 25 percent, the opportunity is cultural rather than technical. Employees already know how to report; the question is whether they believe reporting matters. Executive messaging, manager modeling, and visible security team follow-up to employee reports are the levers that move this metric.

If your reporting rate is substantially above your industry benchmark—in the top quartile or higher—the strategic question shifts to sustainability and quality. High reporting rates can sometimes reflect employees over-reporting legitimate emails as suspicious, creating security team triage burden without improving actual threat detection. The next maturity stage is teaching employees not just to report more, but to report more accurately—distinguishing higher-probability threats from routine unfamiliar communications.

In all cases, reporting rate benchmarks are most useful when tracked over time rather than treated as single-point assessments. An organization with a 12 percent reporting rate that has improved from 6 percent over the past six months is in a fundamentally different position than an organization with a stable 12 percent reporting rate over two years. The trajectory matters as much as the absolute number.

PhishSkill tracks both click rates and reporting rates across all simulations, with industry-benchmarked reporting showing how your organization's active defense culture compares to sector peers. Because employees who report threats are more valuable to your security posture than employees who merely avoid clicking them.

Related Reading

Reporting rate is half the picture. To see how the other half—click rates—vary across industries, read Phishing Click Rate Benchmarks by Industry. For the organizational case that wins budget based on these metrics, see Security Awareness Training ROI. To understand how to actually build the culture that drives reporting, read How to Build a Phishing Reporting Culture.