Menopause at Work: Everything Employers, Managers and Employees Need to Know
The complete guide to menopause at work for UK employers: what menopause actually is, how it affects your workforce, what the law requires from April 2026, and what good support looks like in practice. Written for business owners and managers in Bolton, Manchester and the North West.
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ERA 2025 Updated
Bolton, Manchester, North WestMenopause at work is now a legal and operational issue for every UK employer, not a private medical matter. Around 13 million women in the UK are peri- or post-menopausal, the Employment Rights Act 2025 introduces menopause action plans for large employers from April 2026, and tribunals already treat serious symptoms as a potential disability.
Dealing with a menopause-related absence, grievance or performance issue right now? Book a free 30-minute consultation with DaisyHR. Call 07921 398359.
What Is the Menopause and When Does It Happen?
Menopause is the point twelve months after a woman’s last period. The average age in the UK is 51, according to the NHS. The years leading up to it, perimenopause, are when most symptoms occur, and they often start in the mid-40s and run for four to eight years.
Two facts should change how you think about menopause at work. First, it is not only an over-50s issue. Around 1 in 100 women go through menopause before 40 because of premature ovarian insufficiency, so if you employ women, assume menopause is already present in your business. Second, women rarely get one tidy symptom. The British Menopause Society found women experience an average of seven different symptoms, and half go through menopause without ever consulting a healthcare professional.
The symptoms that matter most at work are not the ones people joke about. Hot flushes are visible. The ones that damage performance are usually invisible: disrupted sleep, brain fog and poor concentration, anxiety, heavy and unpredictable periods, and joint pain. In the Fawcett Society’s survey of over 4,000 women, 84% said difficulty sleeping held them back at work, 73% said brain fog and 69% said anxiety or depression.
Here is the read-across for employers. An employee in perimenopause may have no diagnosis, may not connect her own symptoms to menopause, and may say nothing to you. What you see first is a performance dip, a rise in short absences, or a confident senior person suddenly doubting herself. If your first response is a capability process, you have picked the most expensive possible option.
How Many of Your Employees Are Affected?
13M
women peri- or post-menopausal in UK
4.5M
women aged 50–64 in work
73%
experienced symptoms (CIPD)
The population numbers are big enough that every employer should assume this is on their payroll now. Around 13 million women in the UK are peri- or post-menopausal, roughly a third of the entire UK female population. Around 4.5 million women aged 50 to 64 are in work, and women over 50 are the fastest-growing group in the UK workforce.
The CIPD’s 2023 survey of over 2,000 working women aged 40 to 60 found that 73% had experienced menopause symptoms. Run that against your own team. If you have nine women aged 40 to 60, six or seven of them have symptoms, and two thirds of those will tell you the symptoms have a mostly negative effect on them at work. That is not a marginal welfare issue. That is a chunk of your workforce, and usually the experienced chunk.
Every figure above, and thirty more, sits on our UK menopause at work statistics page with a named source against each number. Use it for board papers; everything on it is citable.
What Menopause Costs You: Productivity, Absence and Retention
£1.88B
annual productivity loss (Health & Her)
14M
working days lost per year
17%
considered leaving due to lack of support
Menopause at work shows up in three lines of your accounts: reduced output, sickness absence and staff turnover.
Start with output. In the CIPD’s 2023 research, 67% of women with symptoms said they had a mostly negative effect on them at work, 79% felt less able to concentrate and 68% reported increased stress. Those are your project managers, your finance leads, your best care staff, quietly working at reduced capacity and saying nothing.
Then absence. Research by Health & Her, cited in the Women and Equalities Committee’s report on menopause and the workplace, put the figure at 14 million working days lost each year, equivalent to £1.88 billion in lost productivity. Government analysis found women with severe symptoms take an average of seven days of menopause-related absence a year. Very little of it is recorded as menopause. It shows up in your data as recurring short-term sickness, which is exactly the pattern that triggers absence review meetings, which is exactly where employers get this wrong.
Then the expensive one: retention. The CIPD found 17% of women had considered leaving work because of a lack of menopause support, and 6% had actually left. The Fawcett Society puts it more starkly: one in ten women who worked during the menopause left a job because of their symptoms, and 27% told the CIPD menopause had damaged their career progression. When a 25-year operations manager resigns, you do not just lose a salary. You lose the knowledge, the client relationships and the recruitment cost of replacing her, and her resignation letter will not mention menopause.
Want the number for your own business? Use our free menopause cost calculator to estimate what unsupported menopause is costing you in absence and turnover.
Your Legal Obligations: What the Law Already Requires
Menopause is not a protected characteristic in its own right, but sex, age and disability all are, and menopause claims are brought under all three, sometimes in the same claim. Where symptoms have a substantial, long-term effect on day-to-day activities, they can meet the legal definition of disability. A tribunal found exactly that as far back as Davies v Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service in 2018, where the dismissed employee was ordered to be reinstated. Once disability applies, you owe a duty of reasonable adjustments, and discrimination compensation is uncapped.
You must assess workplace risks, and that includes how heat, uniforms, shift patterns and rest facilities affect menopausal employees.
Performance-manage someone out without asking why their performance changed, and you hand a tribunal the story it needs. From January 2027, under the Employment Rights Act 2025, the qualifying period for unfair dismissal drops from two years to six months and the compensation cap is removed entirely. The cost of getting this wrong is going up, on a published schedule.
“Is it hot in here or is it just you?” is not banter. It is evidence.
Our guide to reasonable adjustments for menopause covers what tribunals actually expect from employers, with thirty practical adjustments and what each one costs.
ERA 2025 and Menopause: The Deadlines That Matter
The Employment Rights Act 2025 is the first UK statute to treat menopause as a workplace issue in its own right. It requires large employers to publish Equality Action Plans covering the gender pay gap and menopause support. The dates every employer should have in the diary:
The Employment Rights Act 2025 became law.
Employers with 250 or more employees can publish voluntary Equality Action Plans, including menopause measures. Government guidance encourages early publication.
The unfair dismissal qualifying period drops to six months and the compensation cap is removed.
Snapshot date. Employers with 250 or more relevant employees on this date fall into the first mandatory reporting year.
Deadline for publishing the first mandatory action plan, covering the 2027/28 reporting year.
Under 250 staff? You are not directly caught, but you will feel it three ways: candidates will ask what menopause support you offer, tribunals will measure you against what reasonable employers now visibly do, and larger clients are already pushing these questions down their supply chains.
Read our menopause employer obligations 2027 guideWhat a Good Menopause Workplace Looks Like
Only 24% of women told the CIPD their organisation has a menopause policy or support measures in place. That makes decent support a genuine differentiator, in recruitment and at tribunal. Six components, in the order we would build them:
A written menopause policy. One page that says what support exists and who to talk to beats ten pages of legal hedging. Start with our free menopause policy template.
A menopause action plan with named owners and dates. This is the format ERA 2025 requires from large employers, and the format we recommend to everyone, because a plan with deadlines gets done. Download our menopause action plan template, built to match the April 2026 voluntary framework.
Managers who can handle the conversation. The policy is worthless if the first conversation goes badly. Our menopause training for managers covers the one conversation that decides whether you keep the employee or collect a grievance.
Adjustments offered before they are demanded. Desk fans, uniform flexibility, later starts after bad nights, a quiet space, camera-off options for meetings. Most cost nothing, and most are never asked for until they are offered.
Absence recording that does not punish menopause. Record menopause-related absence in its own category and review whether it should count towards your normal absence triggers. Letting it push someone into a disciplinary process is how employers convert a health issue into a disability discrimination claim.
A culture where nobody laughs. Senior sponsorship, plain language, zero tolerance of jokes. Tribunals establish culture from what was said in meetings, not what was written in policies.
Menopause Guidance for Managers: The Short Version
Managers do not need to be menopause experts. They need to not make it worse. The rules that keep your business out of trouble:
Hold the conversation in private and let her lead it. Ask “what would help?” rather than guessing. Confirm agreed adjustments in writing. Review them after a month. Know where the policy is before you need it.
Diagnose (“sounds like the menopause to me”). Demand medical detail. Mention it to the team. Joke, ever. Or ignore a disclosure because it feels awkward — an employee who mentions symptoms once and gets brushed off rarely mentions them twice, and the next document you see may be a grievance or a tribunal claim.
Most menopause at work tribunal claims do not start with a policy failure. They start with one bad conversation with one line manager. That is why our manager training is a 90-minute session, not a course: the conversation, the adjustments menu and the legal tripwires, nothing more.
Menopause Guidance for Employees: What to Tell Your Team
You are the employer, but your policy should tell employees clearly what to do, because clarity protects both sides:
Talk to your GP, and do not settle for “that’s just your age”. Treatment exists, and the British Menopause Society found half of women never seek help at all.
Keep a symptom diary. It helps the GP, and it turns workplace adjustment conversations from vague to specific.
Ask for adjustments in writing, so there is a record both sides can rely on.
Use your flexible working rights. Every employee has had the right to request flexible working from day one of employment since April 2024, and the Employment Rights Act 2025 strengthens those protections further.
Put this signposting in your policy and you have converted an awkward unknown into a process.
The Complete Employer Menopause Toolkit
Everything on this page as documents you can use tomorrow:
- Menopause policy template (Word, ERA 2025-ready)
- Menopause action plan template, matched to the April 2026 voluntary framework
- Manager conversation guide, one page
- Reasonable adjustments checklist: thirty adjustments, by symptom, with typical cost
- Menopause absence recording guide with template wording
- Workplace risk assessment template
- Employee signposting sheet (NHS and British Menopause Society resources)
- ERA 2025 menopause timeline poster, 18 December 2025 to 4 April 2028
Frequently Asked Questions
No. But sex, age and disability are, and menopause discrimination claims are brought under all three, sometimes at once. Where symptoms are severe and long-lasting, they can meet the legal definition of disability, which brings the duty of reasonable adjustments and uncapped compensation. Treat “menopause isn’t protected” as a trap, not a comfort.
Yes, where symptoms have a substantial and long-term adverse effect on normal day-to-day activities, which in practice means lasting or likely to last twelve months or more. Tribunals have accepted this since Davies v Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service in 2018. You do not need a diagnosis on file for the duty to arise; you need to have known, or reasonably been expected to know, that something was going on.
No law forces an SME to have a standalone policy. From the 2027/28 reporting year, employers with 250 or more employees must publish action plans that include menopause support. For everyone else a policy is voluntary, cheap and the single best-value risk control on this page. Our free menopause policy template takes about an hour to adapt.
Yes. Menopause-related sickness absence is sickness absence. Record it in its own category, and think hard before letting it count towards absence triggers: if the symptoms amount to a disability, penalising the absence is discrimination. Note that under ERA 2025, statutory sick pay is payable from day one from April 2026, which changes the maths on short absences.
Yes. Menopause is not a shield against managing performance, but sequence matters. First establish whether symptoms are causing the dip, then make adjustments, then give the adjustments time to work. Jump straight to a capability process and a tribunal will ask why you never asked the obvious question. What you knew, and when, will be examined.
The UK average age for menopause is 51, but perimenopause symptoms typically start in the mid-40s and can run for four to eight years. Around 1 in 100 women go through menopause before 40. Build your support around the 40–60 age band, not just the over-50s.
It is a published document setting out the concrete actions an employer is taking to support menopause at work. Under the Employment Rights Act 2025 it is voluntary for employers with 250 or more staff from 6 April 2026, and mandatory from the 2027/28 reporting year, with the first plans due by 4 April 2028. Our menopause action plan template follows the government framework.
Start with the cheap ones: a desk fan, seating near a window, uniform flexibility, flexible start times after sleepless nights, easy access to toilets and cold water, a quiet room, camera-off meetings. Most cost nothing and most are never requested until offered. Our reasonable adjustments for menopause guide lists thirty, by symptom.
Related Guides
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Written by Samantha Boyle MCIPD — Fractional HR Director, Bolton & North West. CIPD Chartered (Level 7) with a specialism in employment relations. · Last reviewed: July 2026