TL;DR
- UK sickness absence has reached its highest level in over a decade: 9.4 days per employee on average in CIPD’s 2025 survey, up from 7.8 days in 2023 and 5.8 days pre-pandemic.
- Separately, the ONS measured 148.8 million UK working days lost to sickness in 2025, a 2% absence rate, with IPPR putting the annual cost to the UK economy at £103 billion.
- Untracked sickness and holiday requests cost management time long before they cost payroll accuracy.
- Return-to-work conversations are a legal expectation under UK employment law for long-term absence, not just good practice.
- Absence management software should connect leave requests, trend data and manager sign-off in one place.
- The competitive field for this keyword is smaller vendors and HR blogs, which makes it realistic to rank for with a genuinely useful guide.
Absence is rising, and the two ‘official’ numbers don’t agree
Two figures circulate for UK sickness absence and they disagree by more than double, and both are correct because they measure different things. CIPD’s 2025 Health and Wellbeing at Work report, based on a survey of over 1,100 HR professionals, found average absence had reached 9.4 days per employee per year, nearly two working weeks, up from 7.8 days in 2023 and 5.8 days pre-pandemic. That’s the highest level CIPD has recorded in more than 15 years of running the survey.
The ONS Labour Force Survey, by contrast, puts it at 4.4 days per worker in 2025, from 148.8 million total working days lost, a sickness absence rate of 2% of working hours. The gap exists because ONS averages across the entire workforce, including the majority who took zero sick days, while CIPD’s number comes from HR records at employers who are actively tracking absence. Whichever number a business uses to benchmark itself, the direction is the same: absence is trending upward, and IPPR estimates the resulting cost to the UK economy at £103 billion a year.
What untracked absence actually costs a specific business
Take a 40-person business with, say, three or four unplanned absences a month. On paper that sounds manageable. In practice, each one means a manager checking who’s covering the shift, HR updating a spreadsheet, and someone eventually working out whether the pattern is a coincidence or something worth a conversation. None of that shows up as a cost anywhere, which is exactly why it never gets fixed, right up until a business benchmarks its own absence rate against the CIPD or ONS figures above and realises it has no reliable number to compare.
What UK absence management legally needs to cover
Statutory Sick Pay calculations, a documented return-to-work process for longer absences, and a consistent approach to reasonable adjustments all sit inside UK absence management, not as separate compliance projects bolted on afterwards. Return-to-work conversations in particular are worth treating as standard practice after any absence, not just the long ones, since they’re usually where a manager first spots a pattern worth addressing supportively, before it becomes a formal capability or disciplinary matter.
CIPD’s own 2025 findings add useful context here: 66% of surveyed organisations already run occupational sick pay schemes on top of SSP, and 62% believe SSP itself, currently a modest flat weekly rate, is too low to support a genuine phased return. Three-quarters agreed SSP should be payable flexibly, part-time alongside wages, to ease people back to work gradually rather than forcing an all-or-nothing return date.
What to look for in absence management software
The useful features are an approval workflow that doesn’t depend on email back-and-forth, trend flags that surface patterns without a manager having to go looking for them, and a direct link into payroll so SSP gets calculated from the same record rather than recalculated separately. If those three things live in different systems, you’ve mostly just digitised the spreadsheet problem rather than solved it.
Sector benchmarking also matters here. CIPD’s absence data shows meaningful variation by sector, public services absence has historically run higher than manufacturing, for example, so a system that can flag when your rate is drifting away from your own sector’s norm is more useful than one that only shows a raw day-count with no context.
Where this fits inside a wider HRIS
Absence data is most useful sitting next to the rest of an employee’s record: contract type, working pattern, right-to-work status. That’s the difference between an absence tracker and an absence management system that’s actually part of how HR runs, and it’s also what makes the CIPD-style trend analysis (short-term absence patterns versus long-term health-related absence) possible without a manual data pull every quarter.
FAQ
What’s the Bradford Factor and do I need it?
It’s one method some businesses use to weight frequent short absences more heavily than a single long one. It’s not a legal requirement and not universally recommended, some employment law specialists advise against relying on it alone. Treat it as one optional input, not a policy in itself.
Does absence management software calculate SSP automatically?
Typically yes, when it’s integrated with payroll and holds each employee’s working pattern and pay details.
How much unplanned absence is normal for a UK business?
This varies significantly by sector and business size. CIPD’s 2025 survey put the cross-sector average at 9.4 days per employee per year, while the ONS Labour Force Survey measure sits at 4.4 days, so use whichever measurement basis matches how you’re tracking your own data.
Why has UK sickness absence risen so sharply since 2022?
CIPD’s research points to rising long-term health conditions, both physical and mental, as the main driver, alongside NHS waiting times affecting how quickly employees can access treatment and return to work.
Should return-to-work interviews happen after every absence or just long ones?
Best practice is after every absence, not only long-term cases. Short, consistent conversations are usually where a manager first notices a recurring pattern worth addressing supportively.
Is Statutory Sick Pay enough on its own, or do most UK employers top it up?
CIPD’s 2025 survey found two-thirds of employers already run an occupational sick pay scheme alongside SSP, and a majority believe SSP alone is too low to support a proper phased return to work.
