Inside Gravity Payments’ Workforce Numbers

By the workforce-data reporting desk
Last reviewed: July 10, 2026

Gravity Payments says annual employee turnover fell from 22% roughly a decade ago to 6% in 2025, while full-time headcount grew to more than 200. The same company retrospective says applications rose tenfold and revenue per employee doubled. Those figures describe an unusually stable workforce, but they remain private-company disclosures rather than audited labor statistics.

A second company source adds another striking number: 61% of current managers were promoted internally. Gravity’s careers page also reports that 90% of respondents to its 2025 employee survey felt strong autonomy in their jobs, while 91% said their work was important. The page does not publish the survey’s response count, response rate, questionnaire, or outside auditor.

Gravity describes itself as 100% locally owned, and the reviewed materials contain no public-company Form 10-K with audited headcount, turnover, or workforce-demographic tables. The most defensible analysis compares its disclosures with BLS data, current hiring materials, employee reviews, and the Electronic Transactions Association’s 2025 industry study prepared by PwC.

The 6% turnover figure is the central claim

Gravity’s named 2025 document, 10 Years Later: How a $70k Minimum Wage Changed Gravity Payments, says employee turnover dropped from 22% to 6% over the decade following its 2015 pay announcement. It also says more than one-third of the 120 employees working there in 2015 remained with the company in 2025. That translates to more than 40 members of the 2015 workforce still employed a decade later, based on Gravity’s own count.

It is not yet an independently verified retention rate. Gravity does not specify whether its turnover calculation divides all separations by average annual headcount, year-end headcount, or another denominator. It also does not break the 6% into voluntary quits, dismissals, retirements, or internal transfers. Those details affect comparisons because federal labor data use precise survey definitions.

The document adds that half of Gravity’s original six employees remained with the company decades later. This is a vivid longevity statistic, but the group is too small to function as a broader workforce sample. Three long-tenured employees can illustrate institutional continuity; they cannot establish the experience of more than 200 current staff members.

What BLS turnover and tenure data actually show

The closest current federal comparison comes from two separate BLS programs, and neither measures exactly what Gravity reports.

The BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey: May 2026 recorded 76,000 quits in finance and insurance during May 2026, equal to a seasonally adjusted monthly quits rate of 1.1%. The total private-sector quits rate was 2.1% that month. A monthly quits rate is not the same as Gravity’s reported annual turnover rate because it excludes layoffs and other separations, uses a broader industry, and covers only one month.

BLS tenure data offer a second reference point. Employee Tenure in 2024, Table 5, reported median tenure of 4.9 years in finance and insurance in January 2024, compared with 3.5 years across the private sector. Gravity’s statement that more than 40 of its 2015 employees remained ten years later points toward a long-tenured core, but the company does not disclose its own median tenure.

Sources: Gravity Payments’ 2025 retrospective and BLS Employee Tenure in 2024 and Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey: May 2026.

The stronger interpretation is limited but favorable: Gravity appears to have retained a substantial core of employees, while the exact scale of its advantage over comparable payment processors cannot be calculated from public data.

No clean peer ranking exists

Neither BLS nor PwC publishes company-level retention data for small merchant processors. Gravity’s 6% figure can be scrutinized, but it cannot be ranked precisely against direct competitors from public records.

Headcount doubled, but Gravity remains a small industry employer

Gravity says its full-time workforce roughly doubled after 2015 and exceeded 200 employees by the time of its November 2025 retrospective. It also reports 650% revenue growth over that period, profitability in every year, and no debt. None of those business figures is accompanied by audited financial statements on the page.

Industry scale changes the reading. The Electronic Transactions Association commissioned PwC’s Contribution of the Payments Industry to the US Economy in 2024, which estimated 556,600 direct full-time, part-time, and self-employed payment-industry jobs in 2024. Including indirect and induced effects, the study estimated 2,002,180 supported jobs and $210 billion in labor income.

A workforce of just over 200 would represent less than 0.04% of the report’s estimated direct payments employment. That calculation is only a scale comparison, since the PwC total includes many kinds of processors, networks, financial institutions, technology suppliers, self-employed positions, and part-time jobs. Gravity’s headcount figure covers full-time employees.

The PwC labor-income figure includes wages, salaries, benefits, and proprietors’ income, so its $165,000 average is not an employee salary benchmark. Comparing that number directly with Gravity’s $80,000 minimum salary would overstate the gap and mix different compensation concepts.

Internal promotion is strong on paper

Gravity’s careers page states that 61% of current managers were promoted internally. For readers assessing advancement rather than entry pay, this is one of the company’s most useful workforce disclosures because it describes the current management population rather than a single employee story.

The missing denominator matters. Gravity does not disclose how many managers it has, how it defines management, how many promotions occurred during 2025, or whether employees promoted before an acquisition are counted. A 61% share could represent 11 of 18 managers, 22 of 36, or another combination. Each would tell a different story about the depth of the promotion pipeline.

Gravity’s published hiring sequence includes an application, phone screen, preparation call, first interview, another preparation call, second interview, and offer stage. That structure supports the claim that hiring is deliberate, although it provides no median time-to-hire or candidate-conversion rate.

My reading is that the internal-promotion number carries more weight than the careers page’s general culture language, but less weight than a promotion table showing job level, tenure, location, and demographic outcomes.

The employee survey needs its denominator

The 2025 Gravity Payments Company Employee Survey produced three prominent figures: 91% said their work was important, 90% reported strong autonomy, and 91% said people from all backgrounds had equal opportunities to succeed. These numbers appear on the company’s careers page.

The page does not state how many employees were invited, how many responded, whether answers were anonymous, when the survey ran, or whether the reported percentages combine favorable response categories. With more than 200 full-time employees claimed elsewhere, a survey completed by 190 people would offer a different evidentiary base from one completed by 30. Gravity has not supplied that denominator publicly on the reviewed page.

Glassdoor provides an outside but imperfect sentiment check. As of July 2026, its Gravity company page showed a 3.3 out of 5 employee rating based on 152 anonymous reviews, while compensation and benefits were rated 3.8 out of 5. Anonymous review sites attract self-selected participants and do not verify that the sample represents the current workforce.

The contrast does not prove either source wrong. Gravity’s survey may capture a broad current employee population, while Glassdoor may contain older reviews and unusually satisfied or dissatisfied former workers. Without dates and respondent details aligned across both datasets, the difference is a warning against treating any single culture score as definitive.

Where the growth narrative overreaches

Gravity links higher wages with greater employee engagement, improved customer retention, lower hiring costs, and business growth. Its retrospective reports ten times more applicants, doubled revenue per employee, a doubled customer count, and 650% revenue growth since the wage change.

The document also acknowledges that several factors drove growth. That concession matters because the company did not run a controlled study, publish annual payroll microdata, or identify a comparable processor that kept its prior pay policy. The figures establish that wage increases and business expansion occurred during the same decade. They do not isolate the pay floor as the cause of each outcome.

The pandemic episode shows why a clean narrative is difficult. Gravity says 98% of employees temporarily reduced their pay in 2020, with an average employee giving up $4,300, or roughly 20% of pay, while card-processing revenue collapsed. The company says it restored the lost wages by July and avoided layoffs. Contemporary reporting by GeekWire also described employee-selected temporary pay cuts used to prevent job losses.

Employment continuity was preserved during that crisis, but employees temporarily absorbed part of the shock through lower pay.

What is verified, reported, and still missing

Gravity’s public workforce case is stronger than a typical employer-branding page because it supplies dates, historical comparisons, headcount, turnover, internal-promotion share, retirement participation, and employee-survey percentages. Its 2025 retrospective also says average employee retirement contributions rose from $1,900 in 2015 to $6,700, while plan participation increased from 62% to 84%.

Yet the highest-value claims remain company-reported. No reviewed public source supplies a yearly headcount series, employee-level tenure distribution, audited turnover schedule, survey response count, promotion matrix, or demographic breakdown of managers. BLS data can establish that finance and insurance had 4.9 years of median tenure in January 2024 and a 1.1% monthly quits rate in May 2026, but it cannot confirm Gravity’s company-specific numbers.

Data reflects materials available on July 10, 2026. Later hiring, departures, or revised company disclosures may change the picture.

FAQ

How many people work at Gravity Payments?

Gravity said in its November 2025 retrospective that it employed more than 200 full-time workers and that headcount had roughly doubled since 2015. The company has not published an exact July 2026 headcount in the reviewed sources.

What is Gravity Payments’ employee turnover rate?

The company reports 6% turnover in 2025, down from 22% roughly ten years earlier. It does not publish the formula or separation categories used in that calculation.

Does Gravity Payments promote from within?

Gravity’s current careers page says 61% of managers were promoted internally. The page does not disclose the total number of managers or the period during which those promotions occurred.

Is Gravity’s turnover lower than the finance industry average?

A precise answer is unavailable. BLS reported a 1.1% monthly quits rate for finance and insurance in May 2026, while Gravity reports a 6% annual turnover rate for 2025. The measures cover different periods and different kinds of separation.

How long do finance employees typically stay with one employer?

BLS Employee Tenure in 2024 reported median tenure of 4.9 years in finance and insurance in January 2024. Gravity does not publish its companywide median tenure.

Did Gravity Payments avoid layoffs during the pandemic?

Gravity says it avoided layoffs in 2020 after 98% of employees accepted temporary pay reductions averaging about 20%, with lost wages restored by July. GeekWire reported the pay-cut plan at the time.

Gravity’s retention story is plausible and unusually detailed for a private company. The practical limit is equally clear: the company has supplied the headline figures, but not the underlying workforce tables needed to reproduce them.