Stress in finance teams: what you need to know

Work-related stress in Britain is at a record high, and finance teams are feeling it more than most. This guide covers how widespread stress is, what’s driving it in 2026, the warning signs, how to deal with your own stress and your team’s, your legal duties as an employer, and where finance leaders can remove the pressure at source.

Work-related stress in Britain is at a record high, and finance and accounting teams are feeling it more than most.

Tight deadlines, stretched teams and constant change have made stress and burnout a serious health risk across the profession. Yet many people in finance still feel they have to keep quiet and keep going.

How widespread is stress among finance teams?

Nearly a million British workers now report work-related stress, depression or anxiety – the highest level since records began.

The Health and Safety Executive’s latest figures, published in November 2025, found 964,000 workers suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25. That is 2,770 cases per 100,000 workers, more than double the rate when records began in 2001/02, and up from 776,000 the year before. It led to an estimated 22.1 million working days lost, and stress, depression and anxiety now account for 52% of all work-related ill health.

HSE says the main causes are workload – tight deadlines, too much work, too much pressure or responsibility – along with a lack of managerial support, organisational change and role uncertainty. Those will sound familiar to anyone who has worked through a month-end close.

The finance-specific picture is just as stark:

iplicit’s own research points the same way. We asked 1,000 finance decision makers in medium-sized UK organisations, and 40% said they feel stressed often or all the time, while 56% work at least six hours a month beyond their contract. (Read more about the research and the cost of a slow month-end.)

Stigma is a barrier here. Caba found almost half of accountants feel they must appear to be “keeping it together”, and in an earlier survey, 39% worried that asking for support would be seen as weakness.

What’s driving stress in finance in 2026?

Four causes are widely reported:

• Too few people. AAT found four in five employers struggle with skills shortages, and a third (34%) struggled to recruit for finance and accounting roles. A common result is more work for existing staff (AAT, Filling the Gap). Robert Half reports that 58% of UK finance employers expect to grow permanent headcount, but the skills they want remain scarce (Staffing Industry Analysts).
• AI that adds work before it saves it. Korn Ferry found financial services has adopted AI faster than any other industry except tech, yet its workers report the highest exhaustion. Someone still has to check the output, challenge it and own it when it’s wrong – work that didn’t exist two years ago (Korn Ferry).
• A crowded regulatory calendar. Rule changes have landed in quick succession, each adding volume and complexity for existing staff (AccountingWEB).
• Advisory demand outpacing capacity. Silverfin found 43% of UK accountants plan to leave the profession within a year, with many unable to keep up with client demand for advisory work while losing time to repetitive tasks (IT Brief UK).

And underneath all four sits a culture that still prizes “keeping it together”.

Mental Health UK describes the result as a “productivity doom loop”: when people go off sick or leave, those who remain absorb the extra work and their own risk of burnout rises (Thomas Carroll).

Signs that you may be stressed

Stress rarely announces itself. It usually shows up first as small changes in how you think, feel, sleep and behave.

ISMA UK groups the common symptoms into four areas:

• Psychological – difficulty concentrating, memory lapses, being easily distracted, negative thinking, feeling less intuitive and creative.
• Emotional – being tearful, irritable or defensive, mood swings, lack of motivation.
• Physical – aches and pains, muscle tension, grinding teeth, frequent colds, bowel problems, tiredness.
• Behavioural – dropping activities you enjoy, being accident-prone, relying more on alcohol, caffeine, nicotine or drugs, poor time management.

In finance, Caba’s research adds some sector-specific warning signs: more than a third of accountants report insomnia or disrupted sleep, and nearly three in ten have experienced regular panic attacks (The Accountant).

Jasmine Navarro, award-winning wellbeing expert and founder of coaching business Nava, has had her own experience of burnout and says we all need to watch for the signs.

“It might start with being irritable all the time. Maybe your eating and sleeping habits have changed, you have difficulty concentrating and there’s a voice inside you saying you need to slow down,” she says. “I saw signs in myself, but I kept getting new opportunities and thought I had to say yes all the time.”

Haydan Firth, an accredited Life and Performance Coach, suggests thinking about what stress is taking away from you, rather than what it’s giving you.

“You need creativity, clarity and peace of mind for your work. You need a quiet mind to be able to connect with your intuition and you need your body to be in a good place. You know there’s a presence of stress when those things are not accessible to you,” he says. “You might be functional but you’re not functioning.”

How to deal with your own stress

Start by admitting things have been getting on top of you, then change one thing you control.

The NHS sets out eight practical ways to manage work-related stress:

1. Work out what you find stressful.
2. Focus on what you can change.
3. See things differently. Try to step back and reframe negative thoughts.
4. Talk to someone you trust – a colleague, friend, relative or professional.
5. Set boundaries and switch off from work.
6. Calm yourself in the moment. A few slow, deep breaths, repeated three times, can help.
7. Build resilience.
8. Take care of yourself – walks, breaks, stretches and healthy lunches all count.

For Haydan Firth, it starts with a self-audit. “Start with your body. Are you rested? Are you hydrated?” he says. “Something that’s really powerful and underutilised is the idea of getting more connected and grounded. Being in nature – green space and blue space – works wonders.”

Physical activity, from yoga to cold water swimming, can have a big impact. “There’s such power in getting out of your head and back into your body,” he says.

Under stress, leisure time can drift into passive scrolling, streaming, eating badly and drinking. Being more intentional helps. “It’s important to identify what charges you,” says Haydan. “You want to go back to work on Monday feeling good, not just thinking ‘I got through the weekend’.”

In 2026 that also means boundaries with technology. Messaging apps, AI assistants and remote access make it easy to stay “on” around the clock. Turn off notifications outside working hours, and agree with your team when you’ll actually reply.

Jasmine Navarro says mindfulness and deep breathing help – but sometimes we just need to use the magic word “no”. “If you don’t have a healthy relationship with yourself, you’re probably not going to have healthy boundaries with other people,” she says.

She often sees clients stressed by tasks their boss has given them. “Sometimes they end up having a conversation with their boss – and nine times out of 10 there will be a solution. They’ll get help or will be given longer – but most of the time, their boss had no idea they were stressed because the employee just kept saying ‘Yes, I’ll do it’.”

That conversation can feel hard: 35% of workers don’t feel comfortable talking to their manager about stress. If that’s you, support is available. Caba supports past and present ICAEW members and their families, and in the past year provided one-to-one support to nearly five thousand people.

Dealing with stress as a leader

Leaders need to make it safe to speak up – and, increasingly, to show the regulator they are managing stress as a real workplace risk.

“You need to create a space where people can voice their concerns without feeling judged,” says Jasmine Navarro. “As a leader, you can’t be responsible for all the employees all the time, but you have to be approachable and a little bit vulnerable and honest, so that others can be the same. Unless they’re feeling psychologically safe, they’re not going to share anything.”

There is a gap to close. Mental Health UK’s 2026 report found only 27% of workers think mental health is genuinely prioritised at work, and 18% see it as a tick-box exercise. Only 17% of people returning after sick leave got a formal plan to support them back (Workplace Journal).

Some people will prefer to talk to someone outside the organisation. Jasmine suggests hosting workshops with a specialist. Haydan Firth says one-to-one reviews could be outsourced, so people can speak freely and choose whether their concerns are fed back to management.

“People sometimes think managing stress is about doing less, but it’s not. It’s about managing workloads and expectations,” he says. “I really believe traditional one-to-ones aren’t enough any more. People need a space where they can be really honest.”

Know your legal duties

Employers have a legal duty to assess and manage the risk of work-related stress, and HSE is now enforcing it. In December 2025 HSE served a Notice of Contravention on the University of Birmingham, finding its stress risk assessment too generic, its controls not implemented and staff not consulted (Clyde & Co). The lesson: having a policy on paper is not enough.

For finance leaders, that means:

• Carry out a stress risk assessment specific to finance roles and peak periods (month-end, year-end, audit, budget season).
• Use HSE’s Management Standards, which cover demands, control, support, relationships, role and change.
• Involve your team in finding solutions to workload, and check the controls actually work.
• When you introduce AI or automation, track capacity as well as adoption: is the workload actually going down?

This is general guidance, not legal advice. If you’re unsure what your duties are, speak to your HR or legal adviser.

Prioritising self-care

The advice is easy to find. The hard part is making time for it, so put it in your diary first.

“When you plan your diary, the first thing that should go in it should be your self-care processes,” says Haydan Firth. He blocks out exercise, journalling and reading in his online calendar as appointments that cannot be moved.

Jasmine Navarro advises starting small. “Maybe it’s a little bit of deep breathing, maybe it’s writing a couple of sentences in a journal or going out to get some fresh air – or maybe it’s just regularly taking five minutes for yourself,” she says.

“It’s not about changing everything overnight, because that never works anyway. It’s about changing one tiny thing each time – and then that will give you the motivation to move on and try something else.”

Time off matters too. Among accountants who had experienced burnout symptoms, 42% said taking time off helped them recover and 35% reduced their working hours (The Accountant).

Reviewing the finance function

Personal resilience only goes so far. The biggest lever is often removing the manual work that creates the pressure in the first place.

Finance teams work long hours against hard deadlines. Balancing the books, compiling and analysing complex data and presenting it clearly all add to the strain. Everyone knows accuracy matters, but the risk of human error grows with the volume of work – and so does the stress of knowing it.

There is time to win back. Silverfin’s 2026 research estimated accountants could reclaim 1.46 hours of each working day if work was streamlined, yet only 10% of UK accountants were very confident that every team, partner and office follows the same processes (IT Brief UK).

Four areas to review:

1. Automation – take repetitive tasks such as data entry, bank reconciliations and intercompany matching off people’s desks. (See how automated workflows and approvals work in iplicit.)
2. Faster consolidation and close – a shorter, more predictable month-end removes one of the biggest recurring stress peaks. Consolidate across entities and currencies in one system, with intercompany handled in the system and drill-down to the source transaction.
3. Better internal controls and processes – consistent workflows mean fewer surprises and less rework.
4. Live reporting and enquiries – with data in one place, people spend less time chasing numbers and answering ad hoc requests.

The Korn Ferry research is a useful warning: new technology only reduces stress if the work is redesigned around it. Decide what each new tool replaces, who checks its output, and whether workloads have actually fallen.

A look at workloads and working practices, alongside a review of everyone’s relationship with pressure, is a good place to start. For ideas on where the days go at month-end, see our post on the multi-entity month-end close.

Watch: Your month-end is broken: don’t accept a 10-day close. James Bowers-Lee, Solutions Consultant Manager at iplicit, explains why month-end takes as long as it does, how to reduce your reliance on Excel and why a faster close usually means an easier audit. Watch the webinar

Video: Walking With The Wounded’s story with iplicit.

If you’d like to see what a less stressful close could look like, book a demo or watch the 3-minute tour.

Resources

• ISMA UK – Stress Awareness Day and International Stress Awareness Week, held each November
• NHS Every Mind Matters: work-related stress
• HSE: work-related stress and the Management Standards
• Mind – mental health charity
• Mental Health UK – including the Burnout Report 2026
• Caba – support for past and present ICAEW members and their families
• In crisis: call Samaritans free on 116 123, or NHS 111

Sources

• British Safety Council: HSE stress stats reach record high (Nov 2025)
• Clyde & Co: HSE increase their focus on work-related stress (Jan 2026)
• Korn Ferry: Financial Services Workforce 2026 (Sep 2026)
• Spring Health: employee burnout statistics (Apr 2026)
• BambooHR: finance talent data (May 2026)
• Accountancy Today: Caba Behind the Profession research (Nov 2025)
• The Accountant: Caba burnout report (Nov 2024)
• Health & Protection: Mental Health UK Burnout Report 2026 (Jan 2026)
• Workplace Journal: burnout searches hit record high (May 2026)
• AAT: Filling the Gap (Oct 2025)
• Staffing Industry Analysts: Robert Half UK hiring plans (Feb 2026)
• AccountingWEB: UK accountancy talent shortage (Aug 2026)
• IT Brief UK: Silverfin research (Sep 2026)
• Thomas Carroll: understanding burnout (Feb 2026)

More about Jasmine Navarro and Haydan Firth.