World Menopause Day falls on Sunday 18 October 2026, so most UK employers will mark it on the Thursday or Friday before. Marking it is the straightforward part. The harder part is that this is a workforce issue affecting people in the most experienced years of their careers, and one where the organisation is usually the last to hear about it. That combination is why it tends to get treated as a health topic when it is closer to a retention one.
When World Menopause Day 2026 is, and who runs it
World Menopause Day is held on 18 October every year. In 2026 that is a Sunday, which has a practical consequence worth planning around: anything involving colleagues has to happen on the Thursday or the Friday before, and anything involving a supplier or a diary slot with a management team needs deciding well ahead of that.
The day is run by the International Menopause Society. Its purpose is to raise awareness of menopause and of the support available, which for an employer translates into a fairly narrow question. Does anything about how this organisation works actually change, or does the day come and go.
Only 24% say their organisation has a stated menopause policy or other support measures. 43% say it does not and 33% do not know. CIPD, Menopause in the workplace, 2,185 UK working women aged 40 to 60, published October 2023
The 33% is the number to look at, not the 43%
The obvious reading of those figures is that too few employers have a policy. That is true and it is also the least useful part of the finding, because writing a policy is the one step an organisation can take entirely on its own and be finished with by Friday.
The group worth sitting with is the third who do not know. Some of them work somewhere with no policy. Others work somewhere that has one, wrote it carefully, published it on the intranet and has not mentioned it since. From where the employee is standing those two organisations are indistinguishable, and in both cases the support on offer is functionally zero at the moment somebody needs it.
That is a different problem from the one most employers think they have, and it has a different fix. A policy nobody can name is not a support measure. It is a document.
Where the loss actually happens
CIPD surveyed 2,185 UK working women aged 40 to 60 and published the findings in October 2023. 73% had experienced symptoms related to the menopause transition, 57% of them currently. Of those with symptoms, 67% said the symptoms had a mostly negative effect on them at work, and only 28% reported no effect at all.
Underneath that, the specifics are the things any manager would recognise as performance signals if they did not know the cause. 79% of those negatively affected felt less able to concentrate. 53% of everyone surveyed had at some point been unable to go into work because of symptoms.
Here is the part that makes it a retention question rather than a wellbeing one. Almost none of that is visible to the organisation as menopause. It is visible as a run of short absences, a dip in concentration, someone who has stopped volunteering for the visible work. In the sessions we run, what people describe is rarely a resignation. It is being quietly left off a shortlist, not encouraged to go for the promotion, moved sideways by a manager who thought they were being kind. Nobody in that story behaves badly and the organisation still loses 20 years of experience.
Some widely quoted UK numbers on menopause and women leaving work come from a report we have not been able to open and check for ourselves. Rather than repeat a figure we cannot stand behind, we have left it out. Everything above is from a CIPD report you can download and verify in a couple of minutes.
Five things worth settling before 18 October
None of these is a campaign and none of them needs a budget. They are the organisational half of the problem, which is the half a day like this one is actually useful for.
- Find out whether anyone can actually find the support. Ask someone who does not work in HR to locate it from the intranet homepage while you watch. If it takes more than a minute, the 33% who do not know includes your organisation.
- Check what your absence policy allows. Many policies already permit menopause-related absence to be recorded separately from ordinary sickness, which stops a run of short absences quietly triggering a formal process. Very few people know whether theirs does.
- Decide who reviews a capability conversation before it starts. The expensive outcome is a performance process opened against a cause nobody has been told about. One person asking “have we checked whether anything has changed for them” prevents most of it.
- Decide who the day is for. An event aimed at colleagues who are affected reaches people who already know what they are dealing with. An hour aimed at managers reaches the people whose behaviour is the variable. Both are defensible; picking by accident is not.
- Put one date in December to look at it again. Not a survey. Ask whether anyone has used the route since October, and whether three managers picked at random can say what they would do. Vague answers in December mean the day reached the intranet and not the management layer.
The manager side of this is a separate job, and it is the one that decides what actually happens in the room. Our menopause-confident manager guide works through the seven things a manager can do, including what to say in the first two seconds and the four phrases that end disclosure for good.
On the CIPD figures, a team of any real size will include people managing symptoms at work. If none of them has ever mentioned it, the likeliest explanation is not that your organisation is unaffected. It is that saying something has never looked like a safe thing to do.
Make your managers menopause-confident
A policy is worth having and it is not what people experience. Our Menopause at Work sessions work on the conversation itself, the adjustments and the confidence to raise it first. 30, 60 or 90 minutes, onsite or online, tailored before delivery.
Enquire about Menopause at WorkThis article is general information for employers and people leaders. It is not medical advice and it is not legal advice on an employer’s duties under the Equality Act 2010. Anyone experiencing symptoms should speak to their GP. All figures are from CIPD’s Menopause in the workplace: employee experiences in 2023, a survey of 2,185 UK working women aged 40 to 60, published October 2023.