What is a good eNPS score? Benchmarks by industry and what to do next

You have run your first eNPS survey, the result is +18, and now everyone in the leadership meeting is asking the same question: is that good? The honest answer is that it depends, but "it depends" is not useful without numbers. This article gives you the benchmarks, the context behind them, and a clear plan for what to do once you know where you stand.

Below you will find a good eNPS score benchmark for six industries, drawn from Winningtemp's 2024–2025 analysis of more than 1,300 organisations, plus the four factors that most strongly predict a high score.

First, a quick definition: what eNPS measures

eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) measures how likely your employees are to recommend your workplace to others. Employees answer a single question on a 0–10 scale, and the score is calculated as follows:

• Promoters score 9–10, enthusiastic employees who would actively recommend you
• Passives score 7–8, content but not committed; excluded from the calculation
• Detractors score 0–6, employees who would not recommend you, and may say so out loud

The formula is simple: eNPS = % Promoters minus % Detractors. The result is a whole number between –100 and +100. Because Passives are excluded, a workforce full of "it's fine, I suppose" answers produces a low score even without a single unhappy voice, which is exactly the point. eNPS rewards genuine enthusiasm, not mere absence of complaint.

If you want the full methodology, including where the metric comes from and its known limitations, our guide on what eNPS is and how to use it the right way covers it in depth.

What is a good eNPS score? The short answer

Any positive eNPS means you have more promoters than detractors, a reasonable baseline definition of "good". But averages vary widely by industry, so a +10 can be strong in one sector and weak in another.

General averages reported across sources sit between +14 and +21. As a rule of thumb:

• Below 0: more detractors than promoters, a warning signal that needs investigation, not panic
• 0 to +20: around or slightly above typical averages, solid, with clear room to grow
• +20 to +40: strong, you are ahead of most reported averages
• Above +40: exceptional in almost any industry

eNPS benchmarks by industry

Winningtemp's 2024–2025 analysis of more than 1,300 organisations found the following average eNPS scores by industry:

• Hospitality: +42
• Retail and sales: +40
• Finance: +36
• Tech: +31
• Public sector: +14
• Manufacturing: +9

The spread matters more than any single number. A manufacturing company at +15 is comfortably above its industry average of +9, while a tech company at the same +15 sits well below its peers at +31. Judging both against a single "good score" threshold would mislead both leadership teams.

Benchmarks also vary by country, so a Nordic organisation comparing itself against global figures should treat the comparison as directional rather than definitive.

Why context beats league tables

There is no universal benchmark for eNPS, and chasing one is a distraction. Three pieces of context change what your number actually means.

1. Your trend matters more than your position

An organisation that moves from –5 to +8 over a year has a better engagement story than one drifting from +35 to +25, even though the second still "wins" on a league table. An upward trend over time signals progress regardless of your starting score. Track eNPS as a time series, not a snapshot.

2. Major events distort single readings

eNPS is sensitive to layoffs, leadership changes and restructuring, all of which can cause sharp drops that say more about the moment than about your underlying culture. If you measure only once or twice a year, a single badly timed survey can dominate the narrative. This is one reason annual measurement alone struggles, a theme we explore in our comparison of annual engagement surveys versus pulse surveys.

3. One question cannot explain itself

eNPS is a single-question metric. It tells you the temperature but not the cause. A score of +12 does not tell you whether the problem is workload, management, career development or pay. That requires supplementary questions, which is why eNPS works best alongside continuous pulse surveys and targeted focus surveys that dig into specific drivers.

What actually drives a high eNPS

If you want to improve your score rather than admire or dread it, focus on the factors that correlate with it. Winningtemp's analysis of more than 1,000 organisations identified four factors most strongly correlated with higher eNPS:

1. Job satisfaction, the day-to-day experience of the work itself
2. Participation, whether employees feel heard and involved in decisions
3. Meaningfulness, whether people see the point of what they do
4. Leadership, trust in direct managers, which showed the highest correlation of all

That last finding deserves emphasis. The strongest lever for your eNPS is not a perks programme or an internal campaign, it is the quality of the everyday relationship between employees and their nearest manager. If your score is stuck, manager enablement is usually the highest-return investment.

How to act on your score, instead of worshipping it

The biggest risk with eNPS is not a low score. It is collecting feedback and doing nothing with it, which actively erodes trust: employees who answer honestly and see no response learn that answering is pointless. The gap between insight and action is where most engagement programmes quietly fail, what we call the actionability gap.

A practical sequence:

1. Define the purpose before you measure. Decide upfront what decisions the score will inform. A number without a purpose becomes a vanity metric.
2. Benchmark against yourself first, your industry second. Compare this quarter to last quarter before comparing yourself to the tech average.
3. Dig into drivers, not the headline number. Use follow-up questions or pulse data to find out which of the four factors above is dragging or lifting your score.
4. Close the loop visibly. Communicate the results, name the actions you are taking, and report back on progress. This single habit does more for future response quality than any survey design tweak.
5. Give managers the result for their own teams. Since trust in direct managers is the strongest correlate of eNPS, improvement happens team by team, not in an HR slide deck.

eNPS is a starting point, not a verdict. The organisations that improve are the ones that treat the score as the beginning of a conversation, not the end of a project.

What to do Monday morning

If you already measure eNPS, pull up the last four readings and plot the trend before you look at any benchmark. Then compare your latest score against your industry average from the list above, not against the global figure, and write down one sentence explaining the gap. If you cannot explain it, that is your signal to add driver questions to your next pulse.

If you have never measured eNPS, start simply: run the question, calculate the score, and commit publicly to sharing the result and one action within two weeks. A modest score handled transparently builds more trust than a strong score kept in a drawer.

And whatever your number is today: it is neither good nor bad on its own. It is a baseline. What you do next is what your employees will actually remember.