Every simple Hermitian Lie group has a unique family of spherical representations induced from a maximal parabolic subgroup whose unipotent radical is a Heisenberg group. For most Hermitian groups, this family contains a complementary series, and at its endpoint sits a proper unitarizable subrepresentation. We show that this subrepresentation is next-to-minimal in the sense that its associated variety is a next-to-minimal nilpotent coadjoint orbit. Moreover, for the Hermitian groups \(\mathrm {SO}_0(2,n)\) and \(E_{6(-14)}\) we study some branching problems of these next-to-minimal representations.