UK Stress Statistics 2026: The Great British Stress Epidemic

Back in 2018, we surveyed the UK public about stress and were shocked by what these initial stress statistics revealed: 85% of adults experience stress at some point, and for over a third, it was a weekly occurrence.

Stress isn’t just a mental burden, it triggers a rise in cortisol, your body’s primary stress hormone. If you’re concerned chronic stress is already affecting you, an at-home cortisol blood test kit can be a quick and convenient first step.

Fast forward to 2024, and we reran the survey, then again in March 2026, to find out whether the UK’s stress statistics have improved.

So how have things changed in the last 2 years? To find out what the UK’s stress statistics look like in 2026, we reran our survey using a 2,000 person demographically representative UK panel and asking the exact same question.

Here’s how Britain’s stress levels look.

UK Stress Statistics 2026: How Many People Experience Stress?

We surveyed 2,000 people aged 16 and over in the UK in March 2026. We asked them one simple question:

How often, if at all, do you typically feel stressed?

• Every day
• 2-3 days a week
• 4-6 days a week
• Once a week
• Once every 2 to 3 weeks
• Once a month
• Once every 2 months
• Once every 3 to 5 months
• Once every 6 months to 11 months
• Once a year
• Less than once a year, please specify
• Never
• I’m not sure how often I feel stressed

Here are the answers they gave us compared with 2024’s responses:

Between 2024 and 2026, we’ve seen an increase from 6.04% to 7.20% in those who say they are never stressed at all.

This is certainly positive, though still represents a significant occurrence of some stress in the population as a whole.

For a huge 1 in 5 people, stress was cited as an every day occurrence in 2024. As of March 2026, this figure has dropped slightly to 18.15% (just over 1 in 6). So fewer people in the 2 years that have passed, are now experiencing stress as a daily thing.

However, there’s no positive change in the number of those experiencing stress at least weekly, with the figure up to 63.65% (from 63.22% in 2024).

Three quarters (75.90%) of those aged 16 and over in the UK experience stress at least monthly.

Are we actually getting less stressed... or just differently stressed?

The headline figure from our 2026 survey appears, at first glance, to be good news.

Fewer people say they’re stressed every single day — down from 1 in 5 in 2024 to just over 1 in 6 in 2026. But a closer look at the full picture tells a more complicated story.

The proportion of people stressed four to six days a week has risen from 8.13% to 9.30%, and those stressed two to three days a week has also crept upward.

In other words, Britain isn’t getting less stressed, it’s getting one or two days of breathing room. The pressure hasn’t lifted, it’s simply shifted down the frequency scale. When you add up everyone experiencing stress at least a couple of times a week, the picture looks broadly unchanged.

For those of us in the middle of it, that probably rings true.

Stress and Gender

The headline statistics alone here show how prevalent stress remains in the UK in 2026. But when we segmented our survey data to look at men and women separately, we found that women are the likelier to experience stress, by quite some margin.

But the positive news is that the proportion of women experiencing stress every single day is down from 1 in 4 to just over 1 in 5.

This still remains a significantly higher figure than the male equivalent of 15.08%.

Two thirds of women (66.09%) experience stress at least weekly, while 61.05% of men experience this weekly.

Men still remain almost twice as likely to never experience stress as women.

So in all, for both men and women stress remains a prevalent issue in 2026 and women remain significantly likely to experience it more frequently.

Stress and Age

Our original 2018 survey showed that money, work and health concerns are the most common causes of stress. So perhaps we might assume that stress is therefore highest amongst demographics with more financial pressures and high pressure job roles. Or could it be that those statistically likelier to suffer ill health (typically older people) are those most stressed?

We dived into the data by age to find out. We specifically looked at the proportion of each age group who answered that they were stressed at every single day. In addition, we totalled any responses equating to at least weekly.

We then looked at the statistics by age to find out what proportion of people in each age group are stressed weekly or more and those stressed every day and we’ve compared this with 2024’s figures below:

By far, the age group more likely to experience stress on a daily basis is those aged 16 to 24, where 1 in 4 cite daily stress as a feature of their lives. At the opposite end of the scale, amongst the over 55s, this figure drops to just 14.49%.

The likelihood of daily stress has dropped for all those aged under 45, most notably amongst the 35 to 44s, where 1 in 4 cited daily stress back in 2024 and the 2026 figure is just 17.68%.

When it comes to weekly stress though, the figures are up for many age groups. Those aged 16 to 24 are again the likeliest to suffer here with more than 81% citing this as an issue for them.

Again, the 35 to 44s are bucking a trend though, with a drop from 76% in 2024 to 70% in 2026 who claim to suffer from stress at least weekly.

13% of those aged 55% and over claim to never suffer stress at all, significantly higher than any other age group.

We spoke to our Doctor Thom Philips to find out the impact that such frequent bouts of stress is likely to have on younger people in particular and whether we should be concerned about the trends.

"Stress, for anyone of any age, can have a significant physical health impact. When we experience a short period of stress, our cortisol levels and adrenaline levels rise. We experience higher blood pressure and often an elevated heart rate too. Now, if this quickly dissipates and was only a short term experience, there are not likely to be any long term risks. But if you’re experiencing stress every single day, then you may well have consistently high cortisol levels. That is a risk factor for weight gain, depression, issues with focus and concentration, headaches, tension and pain, sleep problems and even heart problems.

It’s an issue for anyone of any age. But I find it particularly worrying that daily stress affects so many young people. If this is something they never are able to escape, then it’s potentially their entire adult life in a state of elevated stress, which could have some serious physical health impacts."

Dr Thom Philips

Most Stressed Regions in the UK

We looked again at the proportion of people struggling with stress every single day.

Our findings are summarised below:

In 2024, Northern Ireland stood out in our regional data, where over a third of residents said stress was a daily feature of their lives, far higher than anywhere else in the UK.

By 2026, that figure has improved substantially, falling to 21.43%. But while Northern Ireland’s story has moved in a positive direction, Scotland’s has moved sharply the other way.

The proportion of Scots experiencing daily stress has surged from 15.98% in 2024 to 26.22% in 2026 — a rise of more than 10 percentage points in just two years, and the largest swing of any region in our survey.

Scotland now tops the table as the most stressed region in the UK, with more than one in four people citing stress as an everyday occurrence. The data doesn’t tell us why — but with the cost of living, housing pressures, and broader economic uncertainty hitting every corner of the UK, Scotland’s sharp rise is a finding worth taking seriously.

There are 4 regions in the UK where stress is a daily thing for more than 1 in 5 of the population:

• Scotland

• Northern Ireland

• Wales

• North West England

Stress and our Wider Mental Health Statistics

Some of our other 2024 research looked at mental health statistics on the whole across the UK.

We found that 1 in 7 people in the UK say their mental health is bad or even the worst it has ever been.

Stress is, of course, a key factor in our mental health with chronic stress being a risk factor for anxiety and depression.

Stress in the UK in 2026

What’s clear is that stress affects almost all of us. For many of us, it’s a very frequent occurrence. This has been the case since pre-covid (as our 2018 figures highlighted) and continues to be the case in 2026, with little by way of change to the overall stress profile of the population.

With busy lives, an “always on” society, stressful news and world events, rising costs and a host of other factors, we have a lot to handle.

Stress isn’t likely to go away overnight. There are things we can do to try and manage our own stress levels. And for those concerned that cortisol levels may be elevated, an at-home cortisol blood test kit can be a good starting point to uncover problems.