Last December I stood in a hotel ballroom holding a plate of cold sliders at 9:40 p.m., doing babysitter math in my head. My sitter was costing me about $22 an hour, I’d been there almost four hours, and the most useful conversation of the night had happened in the first 20 minutes, near the coat check, with a woman from finance I’d only ever seen on Zoom. Everything after that was the same five people from my own team and a DJ who loved Mariah Carey.
So this year I have a rule for the office holiday party: I go, I work the room for 90 minutes, and I leave. The research on how careers actually move backs that up, and the money math makes it easy to defend.
Most people are going to the office holiday party this year, whether they want to or not
The party is not going anywhere. In Challenger, Gray & Christmas’s December 2024 survey of 173 HR and business leaders, 64% of companies planned a holiday celebration, the same share as 2023, although 17% planned to trim the budget. And employees are saying yes more often: ezCater’s 2025 Workplace Holiday Party Trends Report, which surveyed 1,002 full-time workers, found 82% planned to attend, up from 70% the year before. More than half (53%) said they’d rather it happen during the workday.
That doesn’t mean everyone’s excited. A 2025 survey of 1,155 full-time U.S. workers from Sunny, a nonprofit that studies social connection, found that 27% would rather get a root canal than go to their office party. Women were less likely to pick the root canal than men, 23% versus 30%. We’re showing up. A lot of us would just like it to end earlier.
The career value is in people you barely know
Most office party advice is about what not to do: don’t drink too much, don’t wear the sequins, don’t corner the CEO. All true, and all beside the point, because it skips the reason to go in the first place, and that reason has hard data behind it now.
In 2022, researchers from MIT, Stanford, Harvard and LinkedIn published a study in Science that tested an old sociology idea called “the strength of weak ties.” They used random variation in LinkedIn’s “People You May Know” feature across more than 20 million users over five years, a period that included 2 billion new connections and 600,000 new jobs. The result: weaker ties did more for job mobility than strong ones, up to a point. Your closest work friends already know what you know. The person two departments over knows about the opening before it’s posted.
Think about who you actually talk to at the party. The weak ties are the ones you can only reach there: the VP you’ve emailed twice, the person from the other office, the new director nobody’s met. Your own team is the strong-tie table, and you can have lunch with them any Tuesday. In my experience, those quick cross-team conversations happen early, when people are still circulating with a drink in hand and before everyone settles into their usual cliques. By 9 p.m. the room has sorted itself back into the org chart.
The math on leaving after 90 minutes
I ran the numbers with Care.com’s 2026 Cost of Care Survey, which puts the national average for after-school babysitting at $21.87 an hour.
Say the party runs from 6 to 10 p.m. and it’s a 30-minute trip each way. Staying to the end means a sitter from 5:30 to 10:30, which is five hours. Five times $21.87 is $109.35, before any tip.
Now do the 90-minute version. You still need the hour of travel, so that’s two and a half hours of sitting. Two and a half times $21.87 is $54.68. Leaving at 7:30 saves you $54.67, which is half the cost of the night. And if those first 90 minutes are where nearly all the cross-team conversations happen anyway, you’ve kept almost all of the career value for half the price.
Even if you don’t have kids, the same logic applies to your time. Two extra hours of standing by the dessert table is two hours you could spend asleep, at the gym, or at the party you actually wanted to go to that weekend.
How I spend the 90 minutes
I arrive within 15 minutes of the start. That’s when the room is easiest to work, because nobody’s locked into a circle yet and “Hi, I don’t think we’ve met in person” is the most natural sentence in the world.
I set a small goal: three conversations with people outside my team, and one with someone senior I don’t usually see. I keep a couple of easy openers ready (“What are you working on next quarter?” works better than “How about this weather?”), and I listen more than I talk. One drink, max, so I remember who said what. Then I find my manager, say thank you to whoever planned it, and head for the coats. I’ve found a warm thank-you on the way out sticks with people longer than my presence at 10 p.m. ever did.
The next morning, I send one short note or LinkedIn connection to the person I’d most like to keep talking to. That’s the step most of us skip, and it’s the one that turns a nice chat into a weak tie you can actually use later.
If the party is during the workday, go anyway
If your company is in the 53% camp and holds the party during work hours, there’s no sitter math and no reason to skip. Treat it like a meeting with an unusually good snack table. Show up, do your three conversations, and go back to your desk.
And if you really can’t go, tell your manager ahead of time and suggest a coffee with that person from finance in January instead. The point of the office holiday party isn’t the party. It’s the people you don’t otherwise run into, and 90 minutes is plenty of time to find them.
If you’re already thinking about year-end reviews, my guide on how to write a self-assessment pairs well with a little holiday networking. And if the season is already stretching you thin, here’s how to set boundaries between work and your personal life.