Ireland at Work: Where Should the Wellbeing Budget Go in 2027?
Irish employers are investing in wellbeing. Here is what the evidence says about where that spend has the most impact.
A Fitvision report for HR and people leaders in Ireland
Ireland at Work is written for HR and People leaders at Irish employers with 250 or more staff who are setting 2027 budgets.
A note on the figures: every number comes from the body that produced it, not from Fitvision data. Irish evidence comes first. Surveys show direction rather than exact national figures. Where no Irish figure exists, we say so.
Published by Fitvision, Dublin. Research current to 2 November 2026.
Table of Contents
What this report says
Four findings, each drawn from a named body and covered in full later in the report.
1. Work-related illness is rising
Irish workers lost 1.33 million days to work-related illness in 2023, about 21% above the five-year average (CSO, via the Health and Safety Authority). Half of Irish employers surveyed by CIPD name mental health as a leading cause of absence.
2. Employers point to the job itself, and so does the evidence
Irish employers name workload and a lack of management support as the two leading work-related drivers of mental health issues, each cited by 52%. In an Australian trial, four hours of mental health training for managers cut work-related sick leave and returned about ten times its cost.
3. Individual offers show little on their own
A UK study of more than 46,000 workers found that apps, mindfulness and resilience courses on their own made no measurable difference to wellbeing. A large US trial of a workplace wellness programme found no change in absence after 18 months.
4. Most employers cannot say what they get back
No Irish body publishes what employers spend on wellbeing or what it returns. In a UK survey, one in five employers had no stated objective for their benefits spend at all.
For 2027 budgets, that points to the conditions people work in every day: workload, managers and how jobs are designed, with the services people use built around them. Then measure what changes.
Section 1: The pressure on Irish workplaces
Work-related illness in Ireland is above its recent average, and mental health is now employers' top absence concern.
1.33m days lost to work-related illness in 2023, about 21% above the five-year average (CSO, via the Health and Safety Authority).
51% of employers cite mental health as a leading cause of absence (CIPD Ireland, 2026).
52% of employers name workload as a driver of mental health issues, and the same share name a lack of management support (CIPD Ireland, 2026).
What the CSO measured
Each year the CSO adds a module on work-related injury and illness to the Labour Force Survey. The Health and Safety Authority publishes the results. The latest data covers 2023.
Measure | Value | Detail |
Days lost to work-related illness | 1,330,000 | Five-year average: 1,096,200 |
Days lost to work-related injury | 688,000 | 26% above the five-year average |
Workers with a work-related illness | 82,000 | 47,600 missed four or more days |
Illness rate, female workers | 22.4 per 1,000 | More than doubled since 2019 |
Illness rate, male workers | 13.3 per 1,000 | Up 64% since 2019 |
Stress, depression or anxiety, female | 9.0 per 1,000 | Male: 3.8 per 1,000 |
Highest illness rate by age | 38.4 per 1,000 | Workers aged 55 to 64 |
Source: Health and Safety Authority, Annual Review of Workplace Injuries, Illnesses and Fatalities 2023–2024, December 2025, using CSO Labour Force Survey data.
Illness is rising faster among women, and stress, depression or anxiety is more than twice as common among female workers. It is also highest among workers aged 55 to 64, and our earlier Ireland at Work report showed that older workers are a growing share of the workforce.
Physical injury is still a factor. Manual handling caused a third of the non-fatal injuries reported to the HSA in 2024, and the back was the most injured body part, in 18% of cases.
What Irish employers report
CIPD Ireland surveys HR professionals every year with the Kemmy Business School at the University of Limerick. The 2026 edition drew 330 responses, collected in November 2025.
Absence rose in more organisations than it fell. 28% saw absence rise over the year and 25% saw it fall.
Mental health is the most cited cause. 51% cite mental health as a leading cause of absence, ahead of acute medical conditions at 47%.
Wellbeing is getting harder to manage. Over a third say employee wellbeing became more challenging in the past year.
When asked what contributes to mental health issues, employers named these factors:
Non-work factors, such as relationships and family: 60%
Workload and volume of work: 52%
Perceived lack of management support: 52%
Job design or job changes: 34%
Financial distress: 28%
An always-on culture enabled by technology: 26%
Bullying or harassment: 25%
Return to the office: 21%
Source: CIPD Ireland, HR Practices in Ireland 2026, May 2026.
Leaving aside non-work factors, which employers cannot control, every other item on the list is about how work is organised and led. Workload, management support, job design and always-on habits are all decided inside the organisation.
One caution on the mental health figure. CIPD's 2025 survey put mental health as the most common cause of absence for 25% of organisations, against 51% in 2026. The question wording appears to have changed, so the two years are not comparable.
Section 2: What Irish employers are doing now
Irish employers are active on wellbeing. Much of the recent growth has gone into supports people can opt into, while the drivers employers name sit in how work is run.
Where the effort has gone
CIPD's 2025 edition asked where organisations had increased their emphasis on wellbeing over the year. It drew 233 responses, collected in November 2024.
Mental health awareness programmes: 54%
Online wellbeing and health initiatives: 51%
Counselling and employee assistance services: 50%
Encouraging people to disconnect after hours: 41%
Specific steps to reduce a long-hours culture: 29%
Source: CIPD Ireland, HR Practices in Ireland 2025, May 2025.
The first three are services people choose to use, and the last two change the working week itself. Each of the first three drew more new emphasis than either of the last two.
Employers also back two other approaches:
Flexible working. 86% of employers agree that flexible and remote working improves wellbeing (CIPD, 2026).
Financial wellbeing. 82% report embedding financial wellbeing practices, and 51% report rising uptake (CIPD, 2026).
The manager squeeze
Employers have invested heavily in line managers. In the 2025 edition, 85% were coaching line managers and 87% were providing training, up from 51% and 57% a year earlier.
Yet in 2026, the top constraint on HR's impact was line managers' capacity and capability, cited by 61%. That is up ten points in a year, and it has been the top constraint every year since CIPD began asking in 2020.
So managers are being trained more than ever and are still the biggest bottleneck. Training builds skills, but it does not give a manager the time to hold the conversations that prevent absence. Most of Section 4 depends on protecting that time.
The measurement gap
No Irish public body publishes what employers spend on wellbeing, or what that spend returns. We could not find a current Irish figure for the cost of absence to employers either. Section 5 sets out those gaps.
CIPD Ireland's own recommendation is to calculate and communicate the cost of absence regularly, and to use absence, engagement, turnover and workload data to target spend.
The closest large survey comes from the UK. CIPD's 2026 reward survey of 1,059 UK employers found:
22% had no stated objective for their benefits package.
Of those with objectives, 15% never checked whether they were met.
Of those who did check, only 33% said their benefits fully met their objectives.
Source: CIPD, Reward survey: Focus on employee benefits 2026, UK data, conducted by YouGov.
There is no Irish equivalent. If the Irish picture resembles the UK one, many wellbeing budgets are being renewed each year without anyone knowing what they deliver.
Put together, Irish employers are adding supports faster than they are changing the conditions behind the strain, and they are training managers without giving them more time. Little of it is measured against an outcome.
Section 3: What the evidence says works
No Irish study tests which workplace wellbeing spend pays back. The strongest international studies point the same way: individual offers show little on their own, while changes to managers and to the work show the most.
Five studies carry most of the weight here, from the UK, the US and Australia.
1. Individual offers: little measurable benefit
William Fleming of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford compared workers who took part in common wellbeing offers with those who did not. The data covered 46,336 workers in 233 UK organisations.
Across resilience training, mindfulness, stress management, relaxation classes and wellbeing apps, participants were no better off on any wellbeing measure. The one exception was volunteering.
On average, the most common offers did not change how people felt.
Source: Fleming, Employee well-being outcomes from individual-level mental health interventions, Industrial Relations Journal, 2024.
2. A full wellness programme: behaviour up, absence unchanged
US researchers randomly assigned a multi-part wellness programme to 20 of 160 worksites at a US retailer, covering more than 32,000 employees. It ran for 18 months, delivered by registered dietitians, on activity, nutrition, stress and prevention.
Staff at programme sites reported exercising more and managing their weight more actively. There was no significant change in clinical health measures, healthcare spending or absence.
The programme changed what people reported doing without changing outcomes an employer can measure.
Source: Song and Baicker, Effect of a Workplace Wellness Program on Employee Health and Economic Outcomes, JAMA, 2019.
3. Training managers: a measurable return
In a randomised trial at Fire and Rescue New South Wales, 128 managers were split into two groups. Half received four hours of face-to-face mental health training.
Over six months, work-related sick leave fell among staff whose managers were trained, and rose in the comparison group. The researchers estimated a return of about ten times the cost of the training.
A short, practical investment in managers changed absence among the people they manage.
Source: Milligan-Saville and others, Workplace mental health training for managers and its effect on sick leave in employees, The Lancet Psychiatry, 2017.
4. Early, organisation-wide action returns more
Deloitte UK estimates poor mental health costs UK employers £51 billion a year. The largest part, around £24 billion, is presenteeism: people at work but unwell and performing below their usual level.
Its review of published studies found an average return of nearly £4.70 for every £1 employers spent on mental health support.
Returns were higher for early, organisation-wide action, such as culture change and education, than for in-depth support once someone is struggling.
The largest cost never appears on an absence report, and early action returned more than later support.
Source: Deloitte UK, Mental health and employers, May 2024.
5. Wellbeing and company performance move together
Oxford researchers matched employee wellbeing ratings from Indeed with the financial results of more than 1,600 US listed companies. Firms with higher wellbeing had higher profitability and valuations, and a portfolio of them beat standard stock market benchmarks.
At company level, wellbeing and performance go together. The lead author worked on it under contract with Indeed, which the paper discloses.
Source: De Neve, Kaats and Ward, Workplace Wellbeing and Firm Performance, Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre working paper 2304.
What Irish policy already points to
Irish policy points the same way.
The legal duty covers mental health. The Health and Safety Authority states that the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005 requires safe workplaces for mental as well as physical health.
A free, state-backed tool exists. Work Positive CI, run by the HSA and the State Claims Agency with the CISM Network, is a free confidential survey that assesses workplace stressors such as demands, control, support, relationships and change.
The national framework stresses leadership. Healthy Ireland at Work, the national framework for healthy workplaces for 2021 to 2025, emphasises leadership and management support and staff engagement.
Where physical activity fits
Only 41% of adults in Ireland meet the national physical activity guidelines, down from 46% in 2019. Two-thirds of those who fall short say they would like to be more active (Department of Health, Healthy Ireland Survey 2024).
In the US trial above, a campaign lifted self-reported exercise but did not change absence within 18 months. The health case for activity is strong. The case for a stand-alone campaign as an absence fix is weaker.
Our view is that activity works best as part of the working environment: easy access close to where people work, time in the working day to use it, and managers who use it too. This is our judgement from the evidence, not a measured Irish result.
The pattern holds across countries and methods. Individual offers show little on their own, and managers and the design of work show the most. Almost none of this evidence is Irish, which is why the first step in Section 4 is to measure your own.
Section 4: Where the 2027 budget should go
Four steps, in order. Each one says when it applies to your organisation, and none relies on figures beyond what the named bodies have published.
Step 1: Measure the problem before you spend
Start with your own absence data. Calculate last year's absence rate, the top causes, and the cost of cover and lost output. Add turnover where leavers cite workload or burnout, which 27% of Irish employers name as a driver (CIPD, 2026).
CIPD Ireland recommends this, and it gives you the baseline to judge every later step against.
The number will miss some of the cost. Deloitte's UK work suggests presenteeism costs more than absence itself, and it never shows up on a sick-leave report.
When to act: if you cannot state last year's absence rate and top three causes by department, make this the first line of your 2027 budget. The other steps are judged against it.
Step 2: Fix the working conditions first
Irish employers name workload and a lack of management support as the leading work-related drivers of mental health issues. Those are the places to spend first.
In practice, that means:
Assess the work. Run a psychosocial risk assessment. Work Positive CI is free, confidential and state-backed, and it also helps you meet your duty under the 2005 Act.
Fix what it finds. Act on the top two or three stressors it surfaces, team by team. Typical fixes include workload planning, clearer roles, fewer after-hours messages and realistic deadlines.
Protect flexibility. 86% of Irish employers say flexible working improves wellbeing. If you are changing office-attendance rules, count the wellbeing cost as well as the collaboration gain.
When to act: if workload or management support appears among your top causes of absence or turnover, assess and fix the work before adding any new programme.
Step 3: Give managers the skills and the time
The strongest return in Section 3 came from four hours of practical training for managers. Irish employers are already training managers heavily. The gap is time: 61% say manager capacity is the top constraint on HR's impact.
That means two things:
Skills. Short, practical training in spotting early signs of strain, holding the conversation and adjusting work. Base it on the manager's own team.
Time. Take low-value tasks off managers' plates, simplify people processes and set a minimum standard for regular check-ins. CIPD Ireland recommends all three.
This is the same group our earlier Ireland at Work report identified as the bottleneck for AI, retention and progression, so money spent here works on several problems at once.
When to act: if absence varies widely between teams doing similar work, management is the likely difference, so start there.
Step 4: Keep what people use, and build it into the working day
Opt-in services have a clear place. A counselling service or employee assistance programme is a safety net for people in crisis, and it should stay. Judging every offer on use and outcome is also the best way to show what it delivers.
Review each offer. Check uptake, satisfaction and any change in absence or engagement among users. Redesign or replace what nobody uses.
Design for who is struggling. In Irish data, illness rates are highest among women and workers aged 55 to 64. Ask whether your offers reach them.
Make activity part of the day. Only 41% of adults meet the activity guidelines, and most of those who fall short say they want to do more. On-site or nearby facilities, protected time and managers who take part themselves make activity a normal part of the day.
Mind the physical load. Manual handling caused a third of reported injuries in 2024. In operational roles, plan movement and strength work alongside ergonomics.
When to act: if a programme has low uptake after 12 months and no measurable change in your Step 1 data, consider moving its budget to Steps 2 or 3.
Irish employers already spend on wellbeing, so the question is where. The evidence says the money works hardest when it reaches the working day itself: the workload, the manager and the design of the job, with the services people use built around them.
Section 5: Sources, gaps and method
What we could not find
No current Irish figure for the cost of absence to employers. The widely quoted €1.5 billion a year comes from an Ibec survey of 2009 absence levels. It predates statutory sick pay, hybrid work and the current labour market, so it is not a sound basis for planning.
No Irish figure for presenteeism. The only large estimate we found is Deloitte's, for the UK.
No Irish data on employer wellbeing spend or its return. No public body publishes either.
No Irish trial of a workplace wellbeing intervention measuring absence or performance. The trials cited here are from the UK, the US and Australia.
The €8.2 billion figure is not an employer cost. It is an economy-wide OECD estimate of the cost of mental ill-health in Ireland, based on 2015 data. We have not used it.
Primary sources
Every figure in this report traces to one of these publications.
Irish
Health and Safety Authority. Annual Review of Workplace Injuries, Illnesses and Fatalities 2023–2024, December 2025, using CSO Labour Force Survey data for 2023.
CIPD Ireland with Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick. HR Practices in Ireland 2026, May 2026 (330 respondents, November 2025).
CIPD Ireland with Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick. HR Practices in Ireland 2025, May 2025 (233 respondents, November 2024).
Department of Health. Healthy Ireland Survey 2024.
Department of Health with the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. Healthy Ireland at Work: A National Framework for Healthy Workplaces in Ireland 2021–2025.
Health and Safety Authority, State Claims Agency and CISM Network Ireland. Work Positive CI.
International
UK. Fleming, W. Employee well-being outcomes from individual-level mental health interventions. Industrial Relations Journal, 2024.
US. Song, Z. and Baicker, K. Effect of a Workplace Wellness Program on Employee Health and Economic Outcomes. JAMA, 2019.
Australia. Milligan-Saville, J. and others. Workplace mental health training for managers and its effect on sick leave in employees. The Lancet Psychiatry, 2017.
UK. Deloitte. Mental health and employers, May 2024.
US. De Neve, J-E., Kaats, M. and Ward, G. Workplace Wellbeing and Firm Performance. Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, working paper 2304.
UK. CIPD. Reward survey: Focus on employee benefits 2026, 1,059 UK employers.
Wellbeing spend works hardest when it reaches the working day: workload, managers and job design, with the services people use built around them. Then measure what changes.
Ireland at Work
A series for HR and People leaders at Irish employers. Each report takes one question about the workforce and answers it from named sources only.
About Fitvision
Fitvision is a people performance partner that connects wellbeing, leadership and culture through corporate gym management, wellbeing programmes and leadership development. We work with organisations across Ireland, delivering on site inside client workplaces.
If your 2027 plan lands on managers and the working day, that is where we work. We are glad to talk it through. Get in touch.
Empowering People · Elevating Performance
Published November 2026. Research current to 2 November 2026.
