Almost a million workers in Great Britain are suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety. That is according to the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE), marking World Mental Health Day on 10 October. The latest figures from the 2024/25 Labour Force Survey put the number at around 964,000 workers, accounting for 52% of all work-related ill health and 62% of all working days lost because of it.
The scale of the problem in numbers
HSE’s estimate is based on the Labour Force Survey, an ongoing household survey in which workers self-report whether they have health conditions caused or made worse by their work. Work-related stress, depression and anxiety resulted in 22.1 million lost working days in Great Britain in 2024/25. That scope is deliberate: the figures cover England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland, while part of the United Kingdom, falls outside HSE’s remit and has its own regulator, HSENI. Accounting for more than half of all work-related ill health and almost two-thirds of the resulting absence, mental ill health is the leading category in Britain’s workplace statistics.
What the regulator expects from employers
Kayleigh Roberts, HSE’s policy lead for work-related stress, is urging employers to listen to their workers and act on what they hear. An open conversation, she says, helps employers understand what pressures people are under at work and where the risk of stress might lie. But according to HSE, listening is only the first step. “Preventing work-related stress means acting on what you hear,” Roberts said. Employers must identify the risks, take measures to address them, and check whether those measures are working. As examples, she points to reviewing workloads, improving communication, giving workers more say over how they do their jobs, and offering better support.
Employers in Great Britain are legally required to assess and manage the risk of work-related stress. That duty comes from the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, which require a risk assessment of all work activities. HSE supports employers through its Working Minds campaign, which takes a risk-management approach based on HSE’s Management Standards. This includes the Stress Talking Toolkit, a set of structured conversation prompts, as well as tools for assessing stress risk.
Context
Psychosocial strain remains a persistent issue elsewhere in Europe too. According to the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work’s (EU-OSHA) 2025 OSH Pulse survey, 29% of workers in the EU report experiencing stress, depression or anxiety. More than 40% of respondents say they face severe time pressure, and almost 30% report poor communication or cooperation at work. The European and British figures are not directly comparable: the OSH Pulse survey asks about experienced symptoms, while the Labour Force Survey only counts conditions that workers themselves attribute to their work.
Internationally, there is growing recognition that psychosocial risks need to be taken as seriously as physical safety risks at work. In many jurisdictions with similar health and safety legislation, stress and workload are treated as part of the standard risk assessment, rather than mental health being addressed as a separate or secondary issue. The emphasis tends to fall on how work itself is organised — workload, communication and how much say employees have — rather than on how individual workers cope with pressure.
Source: World Mental Health Day: Listen, identify and act on work-related stress, 10 October 2026
Additional research: EU-OSHA, World Mental Health Day: 29% of EU workers suffer stress, depression or anxiety (OSH Pulse 2025)
