Phishing Simulation Benchmarks: How Does Your Organization Compare?

Phishing simulation benchmarks help organizations evaluate their security awareness and identify areas for improvement. Learn how to use these benchmarks to strengthen your defenses.

Ozan Ucar, Founder and CEO of Keepnet

Last Updated: 2026-08-24

Phishing Simulation Benchmarks: How Does Your Organization Compare?

Phishing simulation benchmarks should come from independent datasets, not vendor marketing. The Verizon 2026 DBIR reports median click rates of ~1.4% for email simulations and ~2% for phone-centric scenarios (~40% higher, p. 50). Use these medians to grade cohorts, not to celebrate low single-digit clicks alone.

Phishing simulation benchmarks at a glance (2026)

Channel	Median click rate	Use in benchmarking
Email	~1.4%	Default SAT baseline
Phone / SMS / voice	~2%	Multi-channel programs
Gap	~40% higher on phone	Justifies vishing/smishing sims

DBIR 2026 simulation medians

How to compare your organization

Benchmark by role and channel. Finance and help-desk cohorts often exceed company-wide medians on callback and BEC templates. Pair click data with reporting rate and time-to-report, Gartner finds 84% of organizations track completion while fewer than 10% of MSE measured breaches involve phishing (G00811878).

Why this matters

A 1.2% email click rate means little if phone sims fail at 4% and nobody reports.

What security leaders should do

Publish channel-specific medians in QBRs. Cross-check with SBCP metrics and phishing statistics 2026.

Cohort reporting benchmarks

Track repeat-failure cohorts after each campaign. Compare year-over-year medians against DBIR published sim statistics, not against arbitrary industry blog percentages.

Sources

Verizon 2026 DBIR summary
Gartner G00811878, G00840741 (2025–2026).

Editor's Note: This article was updated on March 12, 2026.

What Better Program Design Looks Like

Phishing Simulation Benchmarks: How Does Your Organization Compare? works best when the content reflects how people actually make decisions. Strong programs do not try to teach everything at once. They focus on the few behaviors that create the most risk, then reinforce them with current examples, timely reminders, and clear reporting paths.

That is also what makes training easier to defend internally. When a program changes behavior, reduces repeat-risk patterns, or improves reporting quality, leaders can see how awareness supports real business outcomes instead of acting like a standalone compliance activity.

Keepnet teams usually see the biggest gains when training is tied to a reporting path and a follow-up workflow. For most organizations, the common mistake is treating phishing simulation benchmarks: how does your organization compare? as content delivery instead of behavior design.

Program Checklist

Choose the user decisions that matter most instead of covering every possible topic.
Use short modules, current examples, and realistic follow-up after incidents or simulations.
Measure reporting, repeat risk, and remediation behavior, not only completions.
Give managers and team leads a role in reinforcing the habits you want to build.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are phishing simulation benchmarks?

Benchmarks are reference rates for clicking, credential submission and reporting that let an organisation compare its results against a wider population rather than only against its own last campaign.

What are the current reference numbers?

The median click rate for email simulations is around 1.4%, and phone centric simulations fail at roughly 40% higher rates (Verizon, 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report, 2026, p. 50).

Are benchmarks reliable for comparison?

Only with caution. Scenario difficulty, industry, audience and even how a click is counted vary between programmes, so a benchmark sets context rather than a target.

What should you compare against instead?

Your own trend, segmented by department and by channel. The useful question is whether reporting is rising and time to report is falling in the groups that carry the most risk.

Which metrics belong in a board report?

Susceptibility by channel, reporting rate, time to report, repeat exposure, and how those move across quarters. Completion counts belong in a compliance record rather than a risk report.

How often should you benchmark?

Quarterly is enough to see a trend. Monthly comparison usually measures scenario variation rather than any change in behaviour.