The short answer is yes, on average. The useful answer is that it depends on what you buy and when you buy it.
Wellbeing budgets are under pressure. Finding the money on top of rising business costs is now the top wellbeing challenge for UK employers, cited by 39% in the CIPD’s 2025 survey. So the question every finance director asks is fair: what do we get back?
The headline number.
Deloitte’s 2024 analysis found that, on average, UK employers get £4.70 back for every £1 invested in supporting their people’s mental health and wellbeing. The return comes mainly through lower presenteeism, absence and turnover.
It’s worth being straight about where that number comes from. Deloitte models it from published studies of workplace interventions, rather than measuring it inside any single company. It’s an average across very different approaches, which is precisely why the detail matters more than the headline.
Where the return goes up, and down.
Deloitte’s own work points in a consistent direction: earlier, organisation-wide approaches return more than late-stage support. Its 2020 analysis put the return on reactive support for people already struggling at around £3 for every £1, against around £6 for organisation-wide approaches that change culture and awareness.
At the other end, some of the most popular spend shows little return at all. A study of more than 46,000 UK workers across 233 organisations found no evidence that people using individual-level offers, such as wellbeing apps, resilience training and relaxation classes, were any better off than colleagues who didn’t (Fleming, 2024). We look at why here.
So the pattern is roughly this. Money spent upstream, across the whole organisation, on how people work and the state they work in, pays best. Money spent downstream, on individuals who are already struggling, still matters for those individuals. Money spent on things people download once and forget pays least.
Run the numbers for your own organisation.
Start with the cost side, because that’s what any return is measured against. Poor mental health costs UK employers £1,676 per employee a year:
Presenteeism: £788
Turnover: £646
Absence: £242
Multiply by your headcount. For 100 people, that’s £167,600 a year. For 500, £838,000.
Then ask a smaller, more honest question than “what’s the ROI of wellbeing?” Ask: if we reduced presenteeism by even a tenth, what would that be worth? For a 250-person organisation it’s nearly £20,000 a year from that single line.
What good investment looks like.
Prevention over cure. Act before people go off, not after.
Whole teams, not individuals. Shared practice changes norms; private apps don’t.
Leaders first. Manager engagement has fallen to 22% globally (Gallup, 2026). A regulated manager changes the temperature of a whole team.
Built into the working day. Something people do between meetings, not another thing to fit in after them.
Measured. Agree in advance what you’ll watch: leave patterns, stress signals, turnover, return-to-work outcomes.
Breathwork fits that profile unusually well. It’s cheap to deliver, works at team scale, and takes minutes. Slow breathing, around 6 breaths a minute, is linked to more parasympathetic activity and lower anxiety, and controlled trials show small-to-moderate reductions in stress. Modest, measurable and repeatable is what you want from an investment.
This is the last episode of Season 1, on the hidden cost of dysregulation. Start from the beginning with presenteeism.
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
Deloitte UK, Mental health and employers, May 2024 (2023 data), and January 2020
Per-employee figures derived by Worker Be from Deloitte (2024) and ONS (2026)
Zaccaro et al., Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2018; Fincham et al., Scientific Reports, 2023
