Northern Ireland’s civil servants notched up an average of 13.8 sick days per year during 2023/2024, an increase from 12.3 days in the previous year.
That’s according to the latest NI Civil Service Sickness Absence statistics published by the NI Statistics & Research Agency.
The 13.8 days lost per staff year represented 6.3% of the available working days in 2023/2024, an increase on the 5.7% days lost in 2022/2023. In salary terms, this equated to an estimated £44.0 million in direct salary cost – equivalent to 4.0% of the total NICS pay bill in 2023/2024. This is an estimated increase of £5 million on direct salary cost in the previous year.
56.9% of staff had no recorded sick absence in 2023/2024 – a decrease from 57.8% in 2022/2023.
The level of absence within Departments varied from 9.5 days for the Department of Health (DoH) to 18.7 days for the Department of Justice (DoJ), with the majority of Departments recording higher absence levels compared to 2022/2023.
The absence level for females (14.8 days) remained higher than that for males (12.9 days) with just less than one third of this difference being due to gender-specific conditions. Staff who had been in post for under two years had a much lower level of sickness absence (8.5 days) than staff who had been employed for two years or more (14.3 days).
More than one in every seven staff (14.0%) had at least one spell of long-term absence – these spells lasted just over three months on average (68.9 working days). This accounted for over three quarters (82.6%) of all working days lost.
Anxiety, Stress, Depression and ‘Other Psychiatric Illnesses’ was the absence reason that accounted for the greatest proportion of working days lost (43.0%) during 2023/2024. Within this category, work-related stress accounted for 32.8% of the days lost.