In 2025 the UK sickness absence rate was 2.0% of working hours. An estimated 148.8 million working days were lost to sickness or injury, an average of 4.4 days per worker.
By industry the rate ran from 1.0% in financial and insurance activities, and in professional, scientific and technical activities, to 3.3% in transport and storage. By region it ran from 1.5% in London to 2.4% in Yorkshire and The Humber.
These are Office for National Statistics estimates from the Labour Force Survey, covering everyone in employment aged 16 and over. They are national context. They are not a benchmark for any individual employer, and the reason why is set out below.
Eleven breakdowns published by ONS for 2025, reproduced without recalculation. Pick a breakdown, and switch between the two measures. Every table below is in the page whether or not scripts run.
What is the sickness absence rate in my sector?
| Industry sector | Absence rate (% of working hours lost) | Days lost per worker |
|---|---|---|
| H: Transport & storage | 3.3% | 7.9 |
| Q: Human health & social work activities | 3% | 6.2 |
| B,D,E: Mining, energy and water supply | 2.9% | 7.3 |
| O: Public admin & defence; social security | 2.4% | 5.6 |
| C: Manufacturing | 2.2% | 5.4 |
| P: Education | 2.1% | 4 |
| G: Wholesale, retail & repair of motor vehicles | 2% | 4.2 |
| N: Administrative & support services | 2% | 4.3 |
| L: Real estate activities [u] | 1.8% | 3.6 |
| R,S,T: Other services | 1.5% | 3 |
| F: Construction | 1.4% | 3.4 |
| I: Accommodation & food services | 1.4% | 2.6 |
| A: Agriculture, forestry & fishing [u] | 1.2% | 3.2 |
| J: Information & communication | 1.1% | 2.6 |
| K: Financial & insurance activities | 1% | 2.4 |
| M: Professional, scientific & technical activities | 1% | 2.3 |
How does sickness absence vary across the UK?
| Country and region | Absence rate (% of working hours lost) | Days lost per worker |
|---|---|---|
| Yorkshire and The Humber | 2.4% | 5.1 |
| Scotland | 2.3% | 4.9 |
| North East | 2.2% | 4.9 |
| Northern Ireland | 2.2% | 5 |
| North West | 2.1% | 4.6 |
| East Midlands | 2.1% | 4.6 |
| South West | 2.1% | 4.4 |
| East | 2% | 4.3 |
| South East | 2% | 4.4 |
| Wales | 1.9% | 4.1 |
| West Midlands | 1.8% | 4 |
| London | 1.5% | 3.3 |
| United Kingdom | 2% | 4.4 |
| Great Britain | 2% | 4.3 |
| England | 2% | 4.3 |
Which occupations lose the most time to sickness?
| Occupation group | Absence rate (% of working hours lost) | Days lost per worker |
|---|---|---|
| Process, Plant And Machine Operatives | 3.3% | 8.1 |
| Elementary Occupations | 3% | 5.1 |
| Caring, Leisure And Other Service Occupations | 2.6% | 5 |
| Sales And Customer Service Occupations | 2.4% | 4.4 |
| Skilled Trades Occupations | 2.1% | 5.1 |
| Associate Professional Occupations | 2% | 4.5 |
| Administrative And Secretarial Occupations | 1.8% | 3.8 |
| Professional Occupations | 1.6% | 3.8 |
| Managers, Directors and Senior Officials | 1% | 2.6 |
Is sickness absence different in small organisations?
| Size of workforce | Absence rate (% of working hours lost) | Days lost per worker |
|---|---|---|
| 500 or more employees | 2.3% | 5.5 |
| 50-499 employees | 2.2% | 5 |
| Less than 25 employees | 1.7% | 3.6 |
| 25-49 employees | 1.5% | 3.3 |
How does sickness absence vary with age?
| Age group | Absence rate (% of working hours lost) | Days lost per worker |
|---|---|---|
| aged 65 and over | 3.3% | 5 |
| aged 50 to 64 | 2.8% | 6.2 |
| aged 35 to 49 | 1.7% | 4 |
| aged 25 to 34 | 1.5% | 3.5 |
| aged 16 to 24 | 1.3% | 2.4 |
How does sickness absence differ between men and women?
| Sex | Absence rate (% of working hours lost) | Days lost per worker |
|---|---|---|
| women | 2.4% | 4.6 |
| men | 1.7% | 4.1 |
Is absence higher in the public sector?
| Public or private sector | Absence rate (% of working hours lost) | Days lost per worker |
|---|---|---|
| Public sector | 2.9% | 6.2 |
| Private sector | 1.7% | 3.8 |
Do part-time workers take more sickness absence?
| Full time or part time | Absence rate (% of working hours lost) | Days lost per worker |
|---|---|---|
| Part-time | 2.8% | 3.3 |
| Full-time | 1.9% | 4.7 |
How much does a long-term health condition change the picture?
| Long-term health condition | Absence rate (% of working hours lost) | Days lost per worker |
|---|---|---|
| long-term health condition | 4% | 8.3 |
| no long-term health condition | 1% | 2.3 |
What is the gap between disabled and non-disabled workers?
| Disability status | Absence rate (% of working hours lost) | Days lost per worker |
|---|---|---|
| Disabled | 6.2% | 12.5 |
| Not disabled | 1.2% | 2.6 |
What do people actually take sickness absence for?
| Reason | Share of occurrences | Share of days lost |
|---|---|---|
| Minor illnesses | 30.4% | 22.2% |
| Other | 15.6% | 19.1% |
| Musculoskeletal problems | 14.6% | 18.3% |
| Mental health conditions | 8.9% | 11.5% |
| Gastrointestinal problems | 6.6% | 6.2% |
| Respiratory conditions | 5.6% | 5.8% |
| Prefers not to give details | 4.5% | 4.3% |
| Headaches and migraines | 4.4% | 2.8% |
| Eye/ear/nose/mouth/dental problems | 3.8% | 3.7% |
| Genito-urinary problems | 3% | 2.8% |
| Heart, blood pressure, circulation problems | 2.6% | 3.4% |
Rows marked [u] are flagged by ONS as based on a sample of between 3 and 25 responses. Treat them as indicative only. Shaded rows are totals that contain the rows above them, not comparable areas in their own right.
The two measures on this page are easy to mix up, and they do not always move together.
The sickness absence rate is the share of working hours lost. ONS defines it as "proportional to the total hours lost because of sickness or injury divided by total hours multiplied by 100". It is a proportion of the time people were expected to work, so it is not affected by how many hours that is.
Days lost per worker converts hours into days at 7 hours 30 minutes each, then divides by everyone in employment, including everyone who took no sickness absence at all. So it is an average across the whole workforce, not the length of a typical absence.
Part-time workers show why the distinction matters. In 2025 their absence rate was 2.8%, well above the 1.9% for full-time workers. But they lost 3.3 days per worker against 4.7 for full-time workers. A higher share of a shorter working week is fewer days. Both numbers are correct, and quoting either one alone tells you something different.
ONS's own guidance is that the rate is the measure to use when comparing over time, because furlough and shielding during 2020 and 2021 distorted the days-lost measures without affecting the rate.
It is not a benchmark you can measure your organisation against, and it would be easy to build one that looked convincing and meant nothing. Three reasons, all of them properties of the source rather than opinions about it.
There is no employer in this data. The Labour Force Survey is a household survey of individuals. Nobody's HR system is being read. Industry, occupation, public or private sector, workforce size and full or part-time status are, in ONS's own note, "self-defined by the respondent". So "manufacturing, 2.2%" is the average for people who told an interviewer they work in manufacturing, which is not the same population as the employees on any given manufacturer's payroll.
The categories are broad and the samples are uneven. Sixteen industry sectors cover the whole economy. Two of them carry an ONS low-sample flag. An organisation of forty people is not a sample of anything.
A difference is not a finding. If your own absence figure is above or below a national one, that gap has no interpretation on its own: it could be your workforce's age profile, your sector definition, how you count, or ordinary variation between small numbers. It is not evidence that anything in your organisation is going right or wrong.
What the figures are genuinely good for is context. They tell you what proportion of working time the country loses, what people say the reasons are, and where the national picture sits, which is useful when you are deciding what is worth measuring in your own organisation and what a sensible question looks like. What a smaller employer should actually track is a separate question, and we have written it up separately.
We publish a mental health map of England built on local-authority public health data, and it carries the same warning as this page: your employees' postcode is context, not a diagnosis. Population data describes a population. It does not describe your workforce, and it says nothing about any individual in it.
Everything on this page is reproduced from one ONS release. No figure here is modelled, adjusted, combined across sources or recalculated by us.
| Source organisation | Office for National Statistics |
|---|---|
| Dataset | Sickness absence in the UK labour market, 2025 edition, and the accompanying bulletin |
| Release date | 1 May 2026. Next release: to be announced by ONS. |
| Retrieved | 14 August 2026 |
| Underlying survey | Labour Force Survey. Each annual figure is the average of four quarterly person datasets. |
| Population | Everyone in employment aged 16 and over, whole of the UK. |
| Geography | United Kingdom, with country and English region breakdowns. No local authority breakdown is published in this release. |
| Statistical status | ONS labels these "official statistics in development". |
| Definitions | Sickness absence rate: total hours lost to sickness or injury, divided by total hours, times 100. Days lost: hours lost multiplied by 52 and divided by 7.5. Days lost per worker: days lost divided by the number of people in employment aged 16 and over. A working day is 7 hours 30 minutes. |
| Which tables | Rates and days per worker: Tables 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 21, with their "b" counterparts. Reasons: Tables 5 and 4a. UK totals: Tables 1, 2 and 3. |
| Licence | Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. |
| How this page is built | A script in our website repository reads the published workbook and writes both the tables and the data behind the controls, so the two cannot drift apart. Refreshing to a new ONS edition is deliberately a manual step: definitions and table numbering change between editions, and the notes need reading before new numbers go on a public page. |
In 2025 the UK sickness absence rate was 2.0% of working hours. An estimated 148.8 million working days were lost to sickness or injury, an average of 4.4 days per worker. The figures come from the Office for National Statistics, using the Labour Force Survey, and cover everyone in employment aged 16 and over.
Of the industry sectors published for 2025, transport and storage had the highest rate at 3.3%, followed by human health and social work activities at 3.0%, and mining, energy and water supply at 2.9%. The lowest were financial and insurance activities and professional, scientific and technical activities, both at 1.0%.
The rate is the percentage of working hours lost to sickness or injury. Days lost per worker divides total days lost by everyone in employment, using a working day of 7 hours 30 minutes. They can point in opposite directions: in 2025 part-time workers had a higher rate than full-time workers, 2.8% against 1.9%, but lost fewer days per worker, 3.3 against 4.7, because their working hours are shorter.
Not as a like-for-like benchmark. These are Labour Force Survey estimates: a household survey of individuals, in which industry, occupation, sector and workforce size are self-defined by the person answering, not taken from an employer's records. There is no employer-level sample. The figures give useful national context for what you measure and why, but a difference between your own absence figure and a national one is not evidence that anything is wrong or right in your organisation.
In 2025, mental health conditions accounted for 8.9% of occurrences of sickness absence and 11.5% of days lost. ONS defines this category as including stress, depression, anxiety and serious mental health problems. Because the share of days lost exceeds the share of occurrences, absences given this reason tended to run longer than average.
In the 2025 figures it was lower. Workplaces with fewer than 25 employees had a rate of 1.7% and those with 25 to 49 employees 1.5%, against 2.2% for 50 to 499 employees and 2.3% for 500 or more. Workforce size in this survey is self-defined by the person answering, and the difference is not explained by the data, so it should be read as a pattern in the estimates rather than an effect of size.
The IWE check-in asks your own organisation nine questions about work and wellbeing, anonymously, every fortnight. Results appear as averages of five or more people. It is free for any employer, and it takes about two minutes to answer.
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