Obesity has kept more than 600,000 working-age Britons out of the labour market, according to new research from the University of York presented at the International Congress on Obesity in Mexico City, which runs from July 15-17, 2026.
Economists analysing data from 284,258 participants in UK Biobank, a long-running British health research project, found that obesity reduces an individual’s likelihood of being in employment by 4.2 percentage points compared with those of a healthy weight.
The researchers calculate that around four in every 100 obese people are out of work solely because of their weight, equating to more than 600,000 people across the UK. They describe the effect as statistically significant.
The study set each participant’s body mass index (BMI), weight-to-height ratio and waist-to-hip ratio against their employment status. Overall employment in the sample was 75.5 per cent and around one in four participants had a BMI above 30, the threshold for obesity.
The effect was more pronounced among men, with obesity linked to a 6.6 percentage point reduction in employment probability, against 2.1 points for women. Conventional analysis had put the two figures at 3.9 and 4.7 points respectively, meaning they moved in opposite directions once confounding was accounted for.
Lead author Aharon Katz, a health economist at the University of York, said further research was needed to determine why obesity appears to have a stronger employment effect among men than women.
“These contrasting findings point to different labour-market consequences of obesity for men and women,” Katz said.
Katz said: “Tackling obesity isn’t just a health imperative, it’s an opportunity to boost economic productivity.
“Because obesity affects workers in the prime years of their working lives, it may have profound effects on their working careers, individual health and societal costs.”
Katz called for policy interventions and workplace initiatives to raise awareness, challenge biases and promote inclusivity.
The findings align with wider estimates of obesity’s drag on the UK economy. Analysis published in July 2025 by Frontier Economics for the innovation foundation Nesta put annual productivity losses from obesity and overweight at around £31 billion (€36.4 billion), with total economic and societal costs reaching £126 billion (€148 billion).
Britain is facing high levels of economic inactivity due to long-term sickness. Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures released on June 18, 2026 show 2.78 million working-age people were economically inactive because of long-term illness in March 2026, against an average of 2.05 million in 2019.
The British Government has begun piloting weight-loss injections for unemployed people as part of an effort to return them to work. Research published in May 2026 by Oviva, a company that runs weight-management programmes for the National Health Service (NHS), found sick days among 1,270 patients prescribed the drugs fell by 45 per cent over nine months, with absences of five days or more down 56 per cent.
Britain is not alone in facing the challenge. The World Health Organization (WHO) found in its European Regional Obesity Report, published in 2022, that 59 per cent of adults across the WHO European Region were overweight or living with obesity, and that obesity prevalence had tripled in many of the region’s countries since the 1980s.
It described the two as having reached “epidemic proportions” and as among the leading causes of death and disability in the region, causing more than 1.2 million deaths a year, or more than 13 per cent of the total. None of the region’s 53 member states was on track to halt the rise in obesity by 2025, and the UK was among those with the highest rates.
Obesity increases the likelihood of developing chronic illnesses including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal disorders and certain cancers, all of which reduce people’s ability to remain in employment.
