Half the posties hired since December 2022 have already quit.
That’s the figure the Communication Workers Union has put forward. Royal Mail disputes it and puts the number closer to 40%.
Either way, the retention crisis has been well documented. It gets the headlines, the parliamentary questions, the union press releases.
But there’s another crisis running alongside it that gets far less attention.
Royal Mail’s own figures show that its sickness absence rate was 5.9% in 2025/26.
The most recent data from the Office for National Statistics puts the UK average sickness absence rate at 2.0%.
Royal Mail is operating at nearly triple the national rate.
And it’s getting worse again.
The Numbers Royal Mail Disclosed
The sickness data comes directly from Royal Mail’s own disclosure, broken down across the last three financial years.
In 2023/24, the rate was 6.8%.
It fell to 5.7% in 2024/25.
Then it climbed back up to 5.9% in 2025/26.
Royal Mail framed the overall trajectory as progress, pointing to the drop from the 6.8% peak. And in fairness, that is a meaningful reduction.
But the reversal in the most recent year tells a different story. Whatever drove the improvement in 2024/25, it didn’t hold.
The company also disclosed that around 180 delivery offices have a sickness rate above 10% at any one time.
Think about what that means in practice. In those offices, roughly one in ten scheduled working hours is being lost to sickness on any given day.
80% of It Is Long-Term
This is not a story about coughs and colds.
Royal Mail confirmed that approximately 80% of its sickness absence is long-term.
The company attributed this partly to “the nature of the work” and partly to an ageing workforce.
Both of those factors are real. Postal delivery is physically demanding work, and Royal Mail’s workforce skews older than many comparable employers.
But there is a significant gap between what the official explanation emphasises and what posties themselves describe when you ask them what’s actually going on.
The Physical Toll Is Getting Worse
We’ve spoken to postal workers across multiple delivery offices, and a consistent picture emerges.
Firstly, the physical toll is undeniable, and it would be wrong to downplay it.
Years of carrying heavy bags, walking miles in all weather, and repetitive physical strain break bodies down over time.
The nature of what posties are carrying has also changed dramatically.
Parcel volumes have surged, and the parcels themselves are getting bigger and heavier.
Amazon has increasingly looked to offload its most unwieldy items onto Royal Mail’s network — the oversized, awkward packages that its own drivers would rather not deal with.
That means posties who were hired to push letters through letterboxes are now hauling bulk goods up garden paths, often multiple times per street, on top of their regular mail workload.
The physical burden is not what it was five or ten years ago. It is significantly worse.
It’s Not Their Bodies That Are Breaking
However, even accounting for all of that, what comes up again and again in conversations with posties is not bad backs.
It’s mental health.
Stress. Depression. Anxiety. Burnout.
Many describe a workplace culture they say has become toxic, with managers passing on pressure from above to hit targets that posties on the ground say bear no resemblance to operational reality.
Walks – the routes posties are assigned each day – are regularly failing.
Letters that should go out don’t go out because the workload doesn’t match the staffing. Parcels fare better, but they’re not immune either.
When those walks fail, it’s not the managers or the planners who carry the weight of it. It’s the postie.
Most residents get it. They can see the person in front of them isn’t the one making the decisions.
But that doesn’t make the job any less demoralising.
Posties describe going out every day knowing they cannot complete the work they’ve been given.
Not struggling to complete it. Knowing they can’t.
They do what they can, bring back what they couldn’t deliver, and then face questions from managers about why everything didn’t go out.
The answer is the same every time. The workload doesn’t match the staffing. It’s impossible.
And then they go out the next morning and do it all over again.
Day after day.
And for many, it becomes too much.
How Royal Mail Compares to Everyone Else
The latest ONS sickness absence data, published in June 2025 and covering the 2024 calendar year, provides the benchmark.
The national sickness absence rate across the entire UK workforce was 2.0%.
Even the public sector, which has historically run higher sickness rates than the private sector, recorded a rate of 2.9%.
Royal Mail’s 5.9% is more than double the public sector average and nearly triple the overall UK rate.
The ONS data also shows that the national rate has been falling. It dropped from 2.3% in 2023 to 2.0% in 2024, continuing a downward trend from the post-pandemic peak in 2022.
Royal Mail’s rate moved in the opposite direction over the equivalent period, ticking back up from 5.7% to 5.9%.
The rest of the workforce is getting healthier. Royal Mail is not.
What Royal Mail Says It’s Doing
The company says it has “made significant progress” on wellbeing and has strengthened its core programme for employees.
It highlighted free 24/7 access to an online GP, physiotherapy, and mental health consultations for all colleagues and their family members.
These are not trivial interventions. Access to physiotherapy and mental health support matters, particularly for a workforce doing physically and emotionally demanding work.
But offering a wellbeing app and an online GP while the underlying conditions driving people to sickness remain unchanged is treating the symptom rather than the cause.
If the walks keep failing, if the pressure keeps building, if posties keep getting shouted at on the street for things they can’t control, then the 24/7 helpline becomes a sticking plaster on a wound that won’t close.
Why This Matters Beyond Royal Mail
A delivery office running at 10% sickness absence is a delivery office that cannot reliably deliver the mail.
When one in ten hours is lost before the day even starts, the remaining staff have to absorb the shortfall. That means more pressure, more failed walks, and more frustrated customers.
Which creates more stress. Which creates more sickness.
It is a cycle, and the 180 delivery offices sitting above 10% suggest it is one that Royal Mail has not yet found a way to break.
The retention crisis gets the attention because it’s dramatic. Half the new starters walking out the door is a striking headline.
But the sickness crisis is arguably more corrosive, because it’s the people who stay who are bearing the cost.
