Mental Health at Work: What UK Employers Are Legally Required to Do in 2026

Workplace mental health has moved well past being a "nice to have" topic for UK employers — it's now underpinned by a specific legal duty, a recognised assessment framework, and a growing body of data showing just how much it affects absence and productivity. Here's what employers are actually required to do, and what the latest figures say about the scale of the problem.

The Legal Duty Employers Can't Ignore

Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, employers have a legal obligation to assess the risk of work-related stress to their employees and to take reasonable steps to manage it. This isn't a voluntary wellbeing initiative — it sits within the same legal framework as physical health and safety duties, which means failing to act on known sources of work-related stress can expose an employer to the same kind of regulatory and legal risk as ignoring a physical hazard.

HSE's Management Standards, Explained

The Health and Safety Executive's Management Standards give employers a practical, six-factor framework for assessing and managing work-related stress: Demands, Control, Support, Relationships, Role, and Change. Following this framework is considered by HSE to be "suitable and sufficient" for meeting the legal duty described above, which makes it the obvious starting point for any employer building or reviewing a stress-risk-assessment process. Each factor points to a specific set of questions — for example, whether workloads are manageable (Demands), or whether employees have a say in how their work is organised (Control) — that can be turned into a genuinely useful audit rather than a tick-box exercise.

What the Latest Data Shows

The scale of the issue is substantial. HSE figures for 2024/25 show 964,000 workers suffered work-related stress, depression or anxiety, and that it accounted for 22.1 million of the 35.7 million working days lost to work-related ill health in Great Britain. CIPD's Health and Wellbeing at Work report, published in September 2025, adds more recent detail: average sickness absence rose to 9.4 days per employee in 2025, up from 7.8 days in 2023, with 41% of employers naming mental health among their top three causes of long-term absence. Stress-related absence was reported by 64% of employers overall, rising to 84% in the public sector. Perhaps most tellingly, only 29% of employers train their line managers to support employees' mental health — despite managers typically being the first point of contact when something's wrong.

The Mental Health at Work Commitment

Beyond the baseline legal duty, many UK employers choose to sign up to the Mental Health at Work Commitment, which builds on the earlier "Thriving at Work" standards and is backed by organisations including Mind and the CIPD. Signatories commit to six standards: embedding mental health programmes with genuine senior-leadership ownership, designing jobs and workloads to support good mental health rather than undermine it, building an open culture where people feel able to talk about mental health, training managers to have these conversations well, providing accessible support tools, and reporting transparently on progress. It's a voluntary framework, but one that gives structure to employers who want to go beyond minimum legal compliance.

Manager Training Is the Biggest Gap

If there's one figure from the data above worth sitting with, it's this: only 29% of employers currently train line managers to support mental health, even though managers are usually the first people an employee will turn to. Closing this gap doesn't require a large budget — even basic training on how to recognise signs of stress, how to have a supportive conversation, and when to escalate to HR or occupational health, makes a measurable difference and directly supports the "manager capability" standard in the Mental Health at Work Commitment.

Practical First Steps for Finance and Accounting Employers

Finance teams carry their own well-documented stress points — deadline-driven cycles, exam-and-work balance for part-qualified staff, and periods of intense workload around reporting deadlines. A practical starting point is running a stress risk assessment using HSE's six factors specifically during your busiest reporting periods, since that's when the gap between demands and support tends to be widest. Pairing that with basic manager training closes the single biggest gap the CIPD data identifies, without needing a large wellbeing budget to get started.

Signs a Workplace Stress Risk Assessment Is Overdue

Some practical warning signs suggest a formal stress risk assessment is overdue rather than optional: rising short-term absence with no obvious physical cause, a noticeable pattern of staff turnover concentrated around specific deadline periods, or informal complaints about workload that never translate into a documented review. None of these alone proves a legal breach, but together they're exactly the kind of pattern HSE's Management Standards framework is designed to catch before it escalates into a formal grievance or a regulatory issue.

Building This Into Your CPD

Understanding the legal duty around work-related stress, and the practical frameworks for managing it, is increasingly relevant CPD for finance professionals moving into management roles, not just HR specialists. Learnsignal's CPD courses cover workplace compliance topics like this one, alongside the related Equality Act 2010 guide for employers who want a fuller picture of their current HR-compliance obligations.