The wellness industry is booming. The workplace slice of it is shrinking. Those 2 facts are related.
According to the Global Wellness Institute, the global wellness economy hit a record $6.8 trillion and is heading for nearly $10 trillion by 2029. Mental wellness alone is a $268 billion sector growing at 12.4% a year.
And yet workplace wellness was the only one of the GWI’s 11 wellness sectors to shrink between 2023 and 2024. Only around 1 in 10 workers worldwide has access to a workplace programme at all.
People clearly want help feeling better. They just aren’t finding it in what work is offering.
Why the old model is tiring.
For 3 decades, workplace wellbeing has largely meant stress reduction: mindfulness, yoga, relaxation, resilience training. Diego Carrete, who tracks the industry through his Wellness Intelligence research, argues that pitching those things in 2026 means selling the previous decade’s products.
The evidence backs him up. A study of more than 46,000 UK workers found no evidence that individual-level offers like these left people better off. We look at why here. Buyers are noticing too: in the US, 51% of large employers say they’re changing or reviewing their wellbeing vendors.
Stress still matters as much as ever. The response has fallen behind the problem.
What’s coming instead.
From stress reduction to regulation. The Global Wellness Summit named “neurowellness” one of the defining trends of 2026: a shift from managing stress after the fact to working directly with the nervous system that produces it. The question changes from “how do we help people relax?” to “how do we help people stay able to think clearly under pressure?”
From perk to performance. The GWI’s Breathe Initiative put breath on its 2026 trends list as a workplace performance tool: simple, trainable and built into the flow of work in small daily doses. That framing matters. Performance tools get budget in a downturn. Perks get cut.
From wellbeing to capacity protection. Carrete predicts a new budget line with a named owner, focused on protecting the capacity of the people an organisation already has. Given that poor mental health costs UK employers £1,676 per employee a year, the largest share of it in people working below capacity, it’s easy to see the business case.
From individual to team. The returns are strongest for earlier, organisation-wide approaches. Expect fewer personal apps and more shared practice, done in work time.
What this means for your budget.
Before renewing anything, ask 3 questions of every wellbeing line:
Does it change state, or just offer information? Knowing about stress and being able to come down from it are different things.
Does it happen in the working day? If it relies on people’s evenings, assume most won’t use it.
Does it work at team level? Shared practice changes culture. Private tools rarely do.
Breathwork happens to score well on all 3, which is why it keeps appearing in the trend reports. It’s also cheap, quick to learn and backed by a growing body of controlled trials. We’d say that, of course. The trend reports are saying it too.
This closes our series on where wellbeing spend leaks. Go back to the start, or see what dysregulation is costing you.
The Working Well assessment shows you where your organisation sits and what dysregulation is likely costing you. Your Working Well briefing, with the full cost model, follows by email.
Take the Working Well assessment today. workerbe.co.uk/working-well
Sources
Global Wellness Institute, wellness economy data, 25 November 2025
Global Wellness Institute, Breathe Initiative trends for 2026, 3 April 2026
Diego Carrete, Wellness Intelligence, 2026
Business Group on Health, 2026 Employer Health Care Strategy Survey, August 2025
Deloitte UK, Mental health and employers, May 2024; per-employee figures derived by Worker Be with ONS (2026)
