Is HR more burnt out than everyone else? The national data don't show it.

Burnout is “very likely” in 62 per cent of HR professionals, according to this year’s biggest survey of the profession.¹ In the national survey that asks HR managers and everyone else the same question, HR managers come out higher, but within the margin of error.²

There’s a story about HR that I see told a lot. Surveys show the profession is burnt out. Most HR people are still passionate about the work, and bad workplaces wear that down. So find an environment that suits you, keep reflecting on why you’re happy or unhappy, and get help from your organisation.

I sell benefits to HR teams, including the employee assistance programme HR people are usually pointed to when they’re struggling. I’m also looking at starting a PhD in January on how organisations act on what their staff tell them, so I’d like the organisational part of that story to be true. I checked each part against the research.

The burnout figures that get quoted run from 23 to 63 per cent depending on who asks and how. No controlled study has tested anything that might help HR people. What little evidence there is backs the last part of the story, that HR needs help from its organisation.

Where the numbers come from

The biggest figure this year is 62 per cent. A survey of 1,447 HR professionals found burnout “very likely” in 62 per cent and a further 12 per cent at risk.¹ It was an open SurveyMonkey link shared through blogs and partner sites,³ so the people in it are the people who chose to answer. The measures are good ones. The full report, which you get by signing up, names standard questionnaires for depression, anxiety, burnout and wellbeing.⁴ It doesn’t say how people were recruited. It’s run by a firm that sells supervision to HR teams, with a benefits broker, which is what I am. It’s also the largest survey of HR people’s own mental health I could find, and it has now run for three years.

Last year’s edition said 63 per cent.⁵ A software firm’s survey said 52 per cent of HR professionals had experienced burnout in the past five years.⁶ Another software firm asked over 270 HR decision makers and found 23 per cent stressed to the point of burnout and exhaustion.⁷ Same profession, same couple of years, 23 to 63 per cent. They’re measuring different things in different people.

The CIPD asks people professionals the same question it asks all UK workers in its national survey. Three in ten say their work harms their mental health.⁸ That’s a lot of people. It’s also a long way from 62 per cent.

Same profession, two years, 23 to 63 per cent

"Very likely" burnout, open online survey, 202563%

"Very likely" burnout, open online survey, 202662%

Burnout in the past five years, software firm survey52%

Work harms my mental health, CIPD, 202630%

Stressed to burnout, ticked from a list, software firm survey23%

Compared with whom

The 62 per cent report says depression in HR is 2.4 times the rate in the general population, 44 per cent against 18.¹ The 18 is real. It’s the Office for National Statistics’ figure for all adults aged 16 and over, from a random sample.⁹ Both figures use the same questionnaire and the same cut-off, which is to the survey’s credit.⁴ The difference is who answered. One group was picked at random from the whole adult population, working or not. The other chose to answer a survey about HR wellbeing.

The anxiety comparison moved between editions. In 2025, 38 per cent was called one and a half times the general population.¹⁰ In 2026, 40 per cent was called 2.6 times.¹ The HR figure barely changed. The figure it was compared with did.

Anxiety: the HR figure barely moved, the comparison did

2025, HR respondents38%

2025, general population, as implied by "1.5 times"about 25%

2026, HR respondents40%

2026, general population, as stated15%

One survey does ask HR managers and everyone else the same question in the same way. The Labour Force Survey asks a random sample of households whether work has caused or worsened an illness, and the Health and Safety Executive breaks the answers down by occupation. Averaged over 2020/21 to 2024/25, 2,770 in every 100,000 HR managers and directors reported work-related stress, depression or anxiety, against 2,080 across all workers.²

The HR figure is higher. It also rests on 20 to 29 people in the sample, its range runs from 1,590 to 3,950, and HSE says the difference isn’t statistically significant. For all work-related illness the two are almost identical, 4,150 against 4,180. HR officers and administrators are too few in the sample to report at all.²

Sweden asks a similar question. There, HR specialists and related analysts are among the occupations with the lowest share of work-related complaints, 17 per cent against 25 for everyone in work.¹¹

When everyone is asked the same question

Work-related stress, depression or anxiety, per 100,000 workers, Great Britain

HR managers and directors2,770

All workers2,080

All work-related illness, per 100,000 workers, Great Britain

HR managers and directors4,150

All workers4,180

So HR isn’t shown to be worse off than other workers. It isn’t shown to be fine either. The UK sample is too small to tell, and I could find no one who has pooled the years of survey data that would make it big enough.

Do HR people love the work?

Nobody has measured it. I could find no study of passion in a representative group of HR people, so “most HR people are passionate” can’t be checked either way.

In other occupations, passion comes in two kinds. Across fifteen studies, harmonious passion, the kind people choose and can step back from, went with less burnout. Obsessive passion, the kind people feel they can’t put down, went with more.¹² In 622 French nurses surveyed six times over five months, workload, unfairness, harassment and supervisor support were linked to how their passion changed.¹³ That’s the nearest test of the idea that bad workplaces wear the passion down, and it’s in nurses.

Passion comes in two kinds

Correlation with burnout, after allowing for the other kind, across 15 samples of 5,296 people

Harmonious: chosen, can step back−0.44, less burnout

Obsessive: can't put it down+0.15, more burnout

What wears HR down

The studies of HR people are small, mostly from outside the UK, and almost all single snapshots, so they show what goes together rather than what causes what. Delivering redundancies, handling grievances and carrying other people’s distress come up again and again.

The most useful finding is from 2009. In more than 400 HR managers, those whose organisations had made handling emotionally charged employee problems a formal part of the HR job had lower emotional exhaustion, even when they did a lot of it.¹⁴ Same work, recognised as work. It’s one survey, read at abstract level, and nobody has tested it as an intervention. It’s still the only HR-specific finding that points at something an employer could change.

Reflection and finding the right place

Neither has been tested in HR people. In other people, the evidence is less comfortable than the advice.

Self-reflection can turn into rumination. In one study, people who reflected more went on to ruminate more, and the total effect of reflection on depression was almost zero.¹⁵ Moving job lifts wellbeing, briefly. In UK household panel data, wellbeing typically drops before a job change and rises in the year of the change, then totally or largely disappears a year later.¹⁶

What helps

For HR people, searches of six databases and two trial registers found no controlled study of any support. There are a handful of uncontrolled evaluations with 8 to 37 people, mostly run by whoever provided the support.^17181920

What has been tested on HR people

0controlled studies of any support for HR staff's own wellbeing

8 to 37people in each uncontrolled evaluation, mostly run by the provider

6 + 2databases and trial registers searched for them

So everything we know is borrowed, mostly from doctors and nurses. There, individual support shows small benefits at low certainty.²¹²² Reviews disagree about whether changing the job does more. One found it did for doctors,²³ and another found the opposite for mental health staff.²⁴ Combining the two lasts longest, and every effect fades with time.²⁵

The large UK study often quoted against individual programmes compared 46,336 workers who did and didn’t use things like resilience training, mindfulness and wellbeing apps, and found participants no better off.²⁶ It’s a single snapshot from an employer survey run by a health insurer, and the author notes that the people who most need help may be the ones who sign up. That’s no evidence of effect, which is different from evidence of no effect.

Do HR people use what they buy?

This is the part closest to my own work. In the 62 per cent survey, 24 per cent of HR respondents said they’d used employee benefits for their own mental wellbeing in the last year, and 68 per cent hadn’t.¹⁴ In a small American interview study, every HR professional had access to an employee assistance programme. Not one used it, and several referred their own staff to the same service.²⁷²⁸ Nobody has measured from usage records whether HR teams use the support they buy.

The people who buy the employee assistance programme

Every oneof the eight HR people interviewed had access to one

Noneof them used it

Severalreferred their own staff to the same service

What the story gets right

Its last part is the one the evidence supports best. HR people need help from their organisations. That’s untested as an intervention, but the strongest HR finding there is, recognising emotional work as part of the job, is something only an organisation can do. The 62 per cent survey points the same way. Respondents who felt well supported at work were less likely to report burnout, anxiety or depression.⁴ It’s one survey at one point in time, so it can’t show which causes which.

What I’d do with this

Measure your own team, anonymously, with a validated scale such as the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory, and repeat it.²⁹ In a small team, have someone outside it collect the answers, or it isn’t anonymous. Add the Health and Safety Executive’s indicator tool if you want to know what in the job is behind the scores.³⁰ That tells you more than any national headline, including the ones I’ve just quoted.

Write the emotional work into the job. Count redundancy, grievance and distress cases in workloads the way you’d count anything else, and say in the role that handling them is part of it.

Treat any support you bring in for HR as an experiment, whether it’s supervision, coaching or something else. Measure before and after, and keep it only if it helps.

Don’t assume your HR team uses the employee assistance programme it buys for everyone else. Ask them privately whether they would, and what stops them.

When a pitch quotes HR burnout at two or three times the national rate, ask how the people were found and what they were compared with.

What this can’t tell you

The evidence review behind this grades ten questions over 278 source records and shows 60 claims, each with the passage it rests on, where it sits in the source, and what that source can’t tell you. AI agents did the searching and the first pass, a random 30 per cent of sources was reopened by separate checkers, and I had every passage in the ledger checked by machine against its source. I read the full 62 per cent report on 10 November. It names its questionnaires and doesn’t describe how its respondents were recruited. About half the sources were read at abstract level, including the 2009 study I lean on most. Almost all the evidence on what helps comes from healthcare workers. I sell benefits to HR teams for a living.

What would change my mind

Pooled Labour Force Survey data for HR managers and officers against similar office jobs, which would settle whether HR is worse off. A randomised trial in HR teams of supervision, changes to the job, or both, followed for at least a year. Records of whether HR staff use the support their employers buy. If any of them shows HR is worse off, or that something works, this note gets a dated correction.

Footnotes

1. Everywhen (2026). HR Mental Wellbeing Report 2026 by Ultimate Resilience, published in partnership with Everywhen. Press release. everywhen.co.uk. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. Health and Safety Executive (2025). Self-reported work-related illness by occupation (LFSILLOCC), Great Britain. hse.gov.uk. Tables 1 and 5, and notes. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Shandwell (2026). The 2026 HR Mental Wellbeing Survey is now live. 29 January 2026. shandwell.com. ↩

4. Ultimate Resilience and Everywhen (2026). The HR Mental Wellbeing Report 2026. Full report, available on sign-up. ultimateresilience.co.uk. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. FM Business Daily (2025). HR profession at risk: 87% do not feel sufficiently supported at work. 9 June 2025. fmbusinessdaily.com. ↩

6. HRreview (2025). HR industry at risk of ‘brain drain’ in 2025 amid resignations. 17 January 2025. hrreview.co.uk. ↩

7. Personnel Today (2025). Stress for HR specialists greater at larger organisations. 2 May 2025. personneltoday.com. ↩

8. Peters, R. (2026). HR pulse report 2026: inside the people profession. CIPD. cipd.org. Section 5. ↩

9. Office for National Statistics (2025). Public opinions and social trends, Great Britain: April 2025. ons.gov.uk. ↩

10. Ultimate Resilience (2025). HR on the Offensive podcast: is HR facing a silent mental health crisis? 4 August 2025. ultimateresilience.co.uk. ↩

11. Arbetsmiljöverket (2023). Arbetsorsakade besvär 2022. Arbetsmiljöstatistik Rapport 2023:02. av.se. Table 1b. ↩

12. Curran, T., Hill, A.P., Appleton, P.R., Vallerand, R.J. and Standage, M. (2015). The psychology of passion: a meta-analytical review of a decade of research on intrapersonal outcomes. Motivation and Emotion, 39, 631-655. doi:10.1007/s11031-015-9503-0. ↩

13. Cheyroux, P., Morin, A.J.S., Colombat, P. and Gillet, N. (2024). Nature, predictors, and outcomes of nurses’ trajectories of harmonious and obsessive passion. Applied Psychology. doi:10.1111/apps.12587. ↩

14. Kulik, C.T., Cregan, C., Metz, I. and Brown, M. (2009). HR managers as toxin handlers: the buffering effect of formalizing toxin handling responsibilities. Human Resource Management, 48(5), 695-716. doi:10.1002/hrm.20311. Abstract. ↩

15. Takano, K. and Tanno, Y. (2009). Self-rumination, self-reflection, and depression: self-rumination counteracts the adaptive effect of self-reflection. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 47(3), 260-264. doi:10.1016/j.brat.2008.12.008. Abstract. ↩

16. Longhi, S., Nandi, A., Bryan, M.L., Connolly, S. and Gedikli, C. (2025). Do all job changes increase wellbeing? Industrial Relations, 64(1), 23-39. doi:10.1111/irel.12354. ↩

17. Nabiya, N. and Rejeki, A. (2025). Counselling sessions to reduce the mental workload of human resources department employees. Observasi. doi:10.61132/observasi.v3i4.1798. Abstract. ↩

18. Murzakhmetova, G.R. (2025). Transformation of HR specialists’ self-recognition by means of exponential coaching. Publishing house Sreda. doi:10.31483/r-127039. ↩

19. Pertsiia, L., Myronets, S., Logvinenko, A. and Halushko, O. (2026). Biomarkers of burnout in high-workload professionals: a pilot study of a metabolic recovery program in HR leaders. Preprint. doi:10.5281/zenodo.23498760. ↩

20. Ultimate Resilience (2026). Does HR supervision reduce burnout? What does the evidence tell us? ultimateresilience.co.uk. ↩

21. Tamminga, S.J., Emal, L.M., Boschman, J.S. et al. (2023). Individual-level interventions for reducing occupational stress in healthcare workers. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD002892.pub6. Abstract. ↩

22. Collett, G., Gupta, J., Eltayeb, A. et al. (2026). Efficacy of individual-level interventions to mitigate the risk for burnout among health care professionals. Annals of Internal Medicine, 179, 51-66. doi:10.7326/annals-25-00469. Abstract. ↩

23. Panagioti, M., Panagopoulou, E., Bower, P. et al. (2017). Controlled interventions to reduce burnout in physicians. JAMA Internal Medicine, 177(2), 195-205. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.7674. Abstract. ↩

24. Dreison, K.C., Luther, L., Bonfils, K.A. et al. (2018). Job burnout in mental health providers: a meta-analysis of 35 years of intervention research. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 23(1), 18-30. doi:10.1037/ocp0000047. Abstract. ↩

25. Awa, W.L., Plaumann, M. and Walter, U. (2010). Burnout prevention: a review of intervention programs. Patient Education and Counseling, 78(2), 184-190. doi:10.1016/j.pec.2009.04.008. Abstract. ↩

26. Fleming, W.J. (2024). Employee well-being outcomes from individual-level mental health interventions: cross-sectional evidence from the United Kingdom. Industrial Relations Journal, 55(2), 162-182. doi:10.1111/irj.12418. Abstract and excerpts. ↩

27. Rendón, E.A. (2026). Navigating the dark side: emotional labor’s impact on HR professionals’ wellness. Doctoral dissertation, Abilene Christian University. digitalcommons.acu.edu. Abstract. ↩

28. Rendón, E.A. (2026). HR is a helping profession. So where’s our supervision? AHRD Insights, 19 October 2026. substack.com. ↩

29. Kristensen, T.S., Borritz, M., Villadsen, E. and Christensen, K.B. (2005). The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory: a new tool for the assessment of burnout. Work & Stress, 19(3), 192-207. doi:10.1080/02678370500297720. Abstract. ↩

30. Health and Safety Executive. Management Standards indicator tool. hse.gov.uk. ↩