"This is not people just being off sick; it is people at work, struggling with their health and wellbeing."
- Neville Koopowitz - Vitality
New research by Vitality, in partnership with Rand Europe, has found that poor workforce health is estimated to cost the UK economy £241 billion a year in lost output. This is equivalent to approximately 8% of GDP.
The findings are drawn from Vitality's Global Health Index 2026 ahead of the Autumn Budget on 28th October and aim to intensify pressure on both employers and the government to treat workforce health as an economic priority rather than a welfare concern.
Vitality says that the dominant mechanism is not absence, but presenteeism: workers who are physically at their desks but are not functioning at full capacity, with the report underlining the scale of the problem and its near invisibility in standard absence data.
The data revealed that an employee with a high mental health wellbeing risk would be estimated to lose an extra 30.3 days of productivity per year, making them the single largest driver of economic output lost to ill health.
In addition, 66% of UK workers report moderate-to-serious psychological distress, but only one in four have a formal mental health diagnosis.
The findings also highlighted a generational gradient, with over eight in ten Gen Z workers, aged 18 to 24, reporting moderate or serious psychological distress, and workers aged between 18 and 34 more than four times as likely to report serious psychological distress as those aged 55 and over. 35% of young women report depressive symptoms, compared to 24% of young men.
These findings come against a backdrop of rising economic inactivity and a growing concern about youth unemployment.
The Milburn Review found that more than one million young people are now not in education, employment or training (NEET), while the Keep Britain Working Review found that around 800,000 more people are out of work due to health problems than in 2019, a figure that could reach 1.4 million by 2030 without concerted action.
However, just one in three UK employers offer counselling or mental health support. The report identifies three higher-impact opportunities for action: automatic enrolment in health support programmes to reach the workers least likely to opt in; board-level accountability for workforce health with metrics in annual reporting; and investment in management capability.
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The data shows a gap of nine lost productive days per worker per year between those who feel their manager supports their health and those who do not.
The UK is also behind its international peers on the basic infrastructure of workforce health. Just 20% of UK employees are offered health insurance through work, including mental health services, and only 13% are offered health screening, against global averages of 33% and 23% respectively.
"Britain's search for growth could be aided by paying more attention to one of our greatest productivity issues," Neville Koopowitz, global CEO of Vitality, said. "This is not people just being off sick; it is people at work, struggling with their health and wellbeing, most likely within organisations that do not measure the health, wellbeing and productivity challenges affecting their workforce.
"It might be an investment, yet it is those employers who are taking the time to understand their employees’ health and associated challenges, and then addressing it, that are seeing real returns. The gap between organisations that do this and do it well will become increasingly visible, with the cost of inaction today already at £241 billion a year."
Christian van Stolk, deputy chief executive at RAND Europe, added: "The evidence linking health and productivity is substantial, yet absence remains the measure that attracts most attention from employers.
"The findings from this Global Health Index suggest this risks overlooking the larger challenge of presenteeism, where productivity is affected while people remain at work. Left unaddressed, these underlying health issues can become a precursor to long-term absence."
