What Profession Cheats the Most? The Rankings, Fact-Checked

Your partner is a nurse. Or a pilot, or in sales, on the road three nights a week. And you've just read a "top 10" list with their job on it, sitting there between two ads as if it were settled science.

Before that list settles in your head, it's worth knowing where it came from. It takes five minutes, and the list doesn't survive it.

Short answer: in the ranking most often quoted, trades come first among men (29%) and medical jobs first among women (23%). That ranking comes from a 2018 survey of 1,074 members of the affair site Ashley Madison. It shows which jobs its members had, not how often people in each job cheat, and no reliable statistic ranks professions by cheating rate. The only representative data sorts jobs by prestige level: among men, the highest-prestige jobs show the highest rate.

This page shows the ranking first, then why it can't be read as a cheating rate, what representative data says, and where the doctors-and-nurses claim comes from.

The ranking everyone quotes

Here it is, because it's what you came for.

Source: survey of 1,074 Ashley Madison members, 2018, as reported by Business Insider on 29 May 2018. Entrepreneurs ranked third for both men and women, without a figure in the text we read.

Why that ranking is not a cheating rate

Look at what the numbers are a percentage of. The survey shows that among members of one affair site who answered, 23% of the women worked in the medical field. It gets quoted as "23% of nurses cheat". Among the men who answered, 29% worked in trades, and that becomes "Tradesmen are the biggest cheaters".

Those aren't the same sentence. Picture a survey of people in a gym at 6am that finds many of them are teachers. It tells you who was in the gym. It doesn't tell you that teachers are fitter than everyone else.

Four problems, then:

• It describes a customer base. The people surveyed had all signed up to a site built for affairs.

• It is a breakdown, not a rate. To know whether nurses cheat more, you would need the share of nurses who cheat. The survey gives the share of respondents who are in medicine.

• It ignores how common each job is. Health care and trades employ a lot of people. Large fields fill any list.

• It is from 2018. Several pages now present it as a "2025 analysis". It is the same survey with a new date.

Other rankings come from the same kind of source: affair sites describing their own members.

What representative data says

There is better data, and it's a lot less exciting.

The General Social Survey interviews a representative sample of Americans. It does not publish results by profession. An analysis by the Institute for Family Studies in August 2025 grouped jobs by occupational prestige.

Ever-married adults who report having had sex outside their marriage. The subgroups are small. That's only one of the types of cheating a relationship can involve, so keep the definition in mind.

The same analysis looked at whether people had a job at all.

What stands out:

• For men, the pattern is a U. High-prestige jobs show the highest rate, upper-middle the lowest.

• For women, it runs the other way. The rate is higher in low-prestige jobs.

• Having a job matters differently by sex. Men without work report more, women in work report more.

None of this names a profession. It is the most solid data available, and it is modest. In every cell of both tables, most people report nothing.

Do doctors and nurses cheat more?

The medical field tops the women's list in the 2018 survey, and a British affair site said in 2025 that nurses were the largest group among its female members. Both describe site members.

One peer-reviewed study is often cited: a 2021 paper in an environmental and public health journal, covering "more than 360 doctors and nurses", in which 21% reported a current or past unfaithful relationship. We read it through a Psychology Today article, not at the source. It has no comparison group outside health care, so it cannot say whether that rate is higher than elsewhere.

In short: there is no evidence that health workers cheat more than others. There is evidence that many of them answered surveys on affair sites, in a field that employs many people.

Travel, shifts, power: what is plausible, and what is not measured

The lists usually come with a theory attached: the hotel rooms, the night shifts, the corner office. Some of it sounds right. Sounding right isn't the same as having been counted.

Opportunity is a reasonable idea. The percentages attached to it mostly are not data. What can be checked about one husband is narrower, and our guide to finding out if he's on dating sites starts there.

What a job title cannot tell you

Even a perfect statistic about a profession would only tell you something about a group, on average, and that a survey was run on a certain population. It couldn't tell you that your partner resembles that population, or whether anything is happening. It couldn't tell you anything about one person. One person is a question you can actually look into, and the free ways to find a hidden dating profile are a fairer place to start.

If your partner is a nurse, a pilot or a salesperson, the lists say nothing about them. They chose a job. The people in the survey chose a website. For the general figures and how to read them, see our cheating statistics page.

If your question is about one person and a dating app, that can be checked directly. CheatEye looks for a profile on Tinder, and on Bumble, Hinge, Happn and OkCupid as an option, from a first name, an age, a gender and a location, with an optional photo, from $17.90. When a profile is found, the report lays out the bio, the photos, the last activity and the last location, plus whether they pay for Tinder, and the person isn't notified. It does not search by phone number or email, and it shows no messages and no live location. Run a search on CheatEye. And if a profile does turn up, read whether a dating app profile counts as cheating before you decide what it means.

Frequently Asked Questions

What profession has the highest rate of infidelity? No representative survey answers by profession. The lists in circulation rank the jobs of an affair site's members in 2018: trades first among men, medical first among women.

Do nurses cheat more than other people? There's no evidence of it. The claim comes from surveys of affair-site members, in which women from the medical field were the largest group.

Does a high-status job make someone more likely to cheat? For men aged 25 to 54, the General Social Survey shows a higher rate in high-prestige jobs (18%) than in upper-middle ones (7%). For women, the higher rate is in low-prestige jobs.

What profession is least likely to cheat? The data doesn't allow a ranking. Lists of "most faithful jobs" use the same affair-site surveys, read in reverse.

Do 85% of affairs start at work? We found no source for that figure. It's repeated from page to page without a survey, a year or a sample behind it.

Can you predict cheating from someone's job? No. Group averages don't predict an individual, and the group averages here are weak to begin with. A question about one person needs a check on that person, such as checking if a spouse is on dating apps.