When a phishing simulation returns a low click rate, security teams tend to relax. Leadership checks a compliance box. The program gets renewed. But a major new study suggests that sense of relief may be completely misplaced.
Oslo-based cybersecurity firm Pistachio released its Phishing Behaviour Report 2026 this week, built from 2.47 million simulated phishing attacks sent to more than 123,000 employees across 1,200-plus organizations between June 2025 and May 2026. The finding that runs through all of it: the click rate, which most phishing programs live and die by, is the wrong thing to measure.
"A low click rate can create a false sense of security," said Joe Jones, CEO and co-founder of Pistachio. "What matters more is what happens next: does the employee hand over credentials, recognize the attack and stop, or report it so the wider business can act?"
A click alone does nothing. Credentials do.
Clicking a phishing link causes no damage on its own. The actual risk begins when an employee submits a password or other sensitive information into a fake login page after clicking. That is the moment a simulated test becomes a real-world breach scenario, and it is largely what most phishing programs do not track.
On their very first simulated phishing exercise, more employees in the Pistachio study reported the suspicious email than clicked it. That sounds like good news. The problem is that 1.57% handed over their credentials anyway. In a company with 500 employees, that works out to roughly eight people who will submit login details to a convincing enough lure with zero prior exposure. Click rate metrics would not flag any of them.
Tech workers are not the safe bet they are assumed to be
One of the more uncomfortable findings in the report concerns employees who are expected to know better. Tech development workers clicked at least one simulated phishing attempt at a rate of 30.27%. IT workers were not far behind at 28.53%.
The assumption that technical employees carry lower phishing risk because they understand how attacks work does not hold up against the data. Understanding how phishing operates and catching a convincing one under inbox pressure are two different things.
Construction carries the most risk. Financial services carry the least.
The gap between industries was wider than most organization-wide risk scores would suggest. Construction workers showed the highest click rate of any department at 41.31% and the highest credential leak rate at 16.47%. Design workers, by contrast, clicked at just 26.35%.
Financial services employees topped every resilience category in the study, which carries some irony. Financial services accounted for 27.7% of all observed phishing attempts in 2025, making it one of the most targeted sectors on the internet. That sustained pressure, combined with strict regulatory requirements and mandatory security training, appears to have produced genuinely more vigilant employees at the individual level.
Health workers showed the lowest reporting rate of any department at 13.17%, despite a relatively low click rate. Logistics workers combined an above-average click rate with a below-average reporting rate of 17.11%. In both cases, the click rate alone would present a more reassuring picture than the full data supports.
Things get worse before they get better
Organizations running 12-month programs saw click rates and credential submission rates both rise through the first six months before declining. That initial rise reflects harder and more frequent testing rather than employees regressing. At the six-month mark, employees were receiving an average of 3.5 simulations per person, with 50.4% classified as hard difficulty.
From that six-month peak to the 12-month stage, clicks declined by 27% and credential leaks by 41%. The report-to-click ratio increased from 1.3 at three months to 1.8 at 12 months, indicating that suspicious messages were reported nearly twice as often as they were clicked by the end of the program.
Organizations that run a single phishing simulation and judge the program from that result are drawing conclusions from the noisiest and least reliable moment in the entire training cycle.
What to track instead
The report does not argue that click rates should be dropped entirely. It argues they should sit alongside credential submission rates and reporting rates, which together give a far more accurate picture of actual resilience. Making it easy for employees to report suspicious emails, through one-click tools and fast confirmation, converts the workforce into an active detection channel rather than a passive one.
NIST research found that 72% of organizations use phishing simulation click rates to gauge training effectiveness. By that measure, nearly three quarters of corporate security awareness programs are optimizing for an incomplete signal, in a threat environment where AI-driven phishing has pushed click rates among untrained employees to a record high of 54% in 2026.
The click rate was never the whole story. At this point, relying on it alone is a liability.