Health and Safety Budgeting Guide for 2026

In nearly four decades working across health and safety enforcement, management, training and consultancy, I've seen budgeting conversations go two ways. Either health and safety is treated as a proper strategic investment, one that protects people, productivity and the bottom line, or it's treated as an afterthought, bolted onto the finance spreadsheet when everything else has already been allocated.

The cost of getting this wrong has never been clearer. According to the HSE's Summary Statistics for Great Britain 2025, an estimated £22.9 billion was the cost of injuries and ill health from current working conditions in 2023/24, with 40.1 million working days lost due to work-related ill health and injury in 2024/25. These aren't abstract numbers. They represent real businesses carrying costs that a well-structured health and safety budget could have reduced significantly.

What Is a Health and Safety Budget, and Why Does It Matter?

A health and safety budget is a structured financial plan that allocates resources to everything your organisation needs to protect its people and remain legally compliant. This should include items such as:

• Training
• Personal protective equipment (PPE),
• Risk assessments
• Fire safety
• Occupational health
• Workplace monitoring
• Emergency preparedness
• Software systems
• A contingency reserve for the unexpected

For health and safety professionals stepping into more senior roles, whether as a Health and Safety Manager, Director, or Head of Health and Safety, budget ownership is often one of the first real tests of strategic credibility.

Done well, a health and safety budget tracks spend in addition to demonstrating value, justifying investment, and giving you the evidence base you need to influence board-level decisions.

What's Influencing H&S Budgets in 2026?

Before you can build an effective budget, you need to understand the landscape you're operating in. Several trends are shaping where health and safety spending is going in 2026:

• Mental health and well-being costs are escalating fast. Mental health conditions remain a primary cause of work-related ill health, with 964,000 workers reporting stress, depression or anxiety created or made worse by work in 2024/25, a rise of almost 25% compared to the previous year, resulting in 22.1 million working days lost. Occupational health provision, EAP programmes and stress risk assessments are increasingly non-negotiable.
• Workplace injury remains stubbornly persistent. An estimated 680,000 workers sustained a workplace non-fatal injury in 2024/25, with 4.4 million working days lost due to non-fatal injuries alone. Slips, trips and falls, manual handling, and falls from height continue to dominate, and these are the categories where targeted training investment pays dividends.
• Regulatory pressure isn't easing. The HSE's 10-year strategy runs to 2032, and enforcement activity remains active. Fines under the sentencing guidelines for health and safety offences can run to millions for larger organisations. The reputational damage and the indirect costs of investigation, legal fees and lost productivity far outweigh the cost of proactive compliance.
• AI and technology are changing the risk picture. Autonomous machinery, digital fatigue, and hybrid working arrangements are just some of the new hazards that are emerging faster than many risk assessment frameworks can track. Budget provisions for technology-related risk management and updated training are increasingly important.

How to Structure Your Health and Safety Budget 

A robust H&S budget typically covers the following areas. The figures below are indicative for a mid-sized UK organisation, drawn from common benchmarks; your requirements will vary by sector, size and risk profile.

Training and Competence

Covers formal qualifications like NEBOSH and IOSH courses, in-house delivery, first aid, manual handling, fire safety, CPD events and e-learning platform subscriptions. This is often one of the highest-value categories because trained people create safer workplaces, and because formal qualifications protect both the individual and the organisation in the event of an incident.

Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

Includes head protection, eye and face protection, hearing protection, respiratory protective equipment (RPE), high-visibility clothing, gloves and protective footwear. PPE budgets need to account for replacement cycles, not just initial provision. This is a common area where underspend in year one creates overspend later.

Risk Assessment and Compliance

Encompasses risk assessment reviews and consultancy, health surveillance, medical screening, COSHH assessments, occupational hygiene surveys and noise or vibration monitoring. Given that handling, lifting, and carrying remain major contributors to harm, especially in construction and manufacturing, investing in regular assessment cycles pays for itself.

Fire Safety

Covers fire risk assessments, extinguisher maintenance, alarm testing, signage and evacuation equipment. This category is frequently underfunded until a near-miss or enforcement notice forces the issue.

Emergency Preparedness

Includes first-aid kit provision, defibrillators, and emergency planning and drills. Often overlooked in budget cycles but critically important when they're needed.

Workplace Safety Monitoring

Spans safety audits, inspections, equipment inspections, DSE assessments and lone worker monitoring. Building this into your budget as a recurring cost, not a one-off, is the hallmark of a mature H&S management system.

Wellbeing and Occupational Health

Covers EAP subscriptions, occupational health referrals, mental health first aid training, health surveillance and wellbeing initiatives. Given the trajectory of work-related stress data, this is the category most likely to need upward revision in 2026.

Software and Administration

Includes H&S management systems, incident reporting platforms and document management tools. Technology investment in this area typically delivers strong returns through efficiency gains and improved audit trails.

Contingency Reserve

Typically, 10–15% of the total budget is your buffer for unplanned spend following an incident, a change in legislation, or an emergency remediation requirement. Seasoned H&S professionals know that under no circumstances is this category to be viewed as an optional expense. Without it your budget has no resilience against any unexpected circumstances.

How to Make the Business Case for Your H&S Budget

One of the most important skills for any health and safety professional operating at a senior level is the ability to translate safety investment into business language. Board members and finance directors respond to risk, return on investment and regulatory exposure. Not just moral obligations.

Here are three approaches that consistently land well.

Anchor to the cost of failure. Use the HSE's cost model as a baseline. The majority of costs fall on individuals, driven by human costs, while employers and government/taxpayers bear a similar proportion of the remaining costs of workplace injury and ill health. That employer share, when broken down per incident, is often far higher than the cost of prevention. Calculate what a single serious injury could cost your organisation in investigation time, temporary cover, legal fees, potential fines and reputational damage. Your training budget will look very reasonable by comparison.

Use incident cost data. If your organisation has an incident log, work with it. Attach direct costs, indirect costs, investigation time and lost productivity to historical incidents. A well-maintained incident cost log (like the one in our downloadable budget template) gives you a compelling internal data set that no external benchmark can match.

Frame training as an asset, not an expense. Qualifications like the NEBOSH Level 6 Diploma signal to regulators, clients and insurers that your organisation takes H&S seriously. For professionals targeting director-level roles, the Diploma is the qualification that demonstrates they're ready to operate at a strategic level, managing budgets, influencing policy and leading cultural change.

Common Budgeting Mistakes to Avoid

After decades in this field, the mistakes I see repeated most often are these.

Building a compliance-only budget leaves no room for proactive investment. The minimum legal requirement keeps you out of court. It doesn't build a safety culture or reduce your injury rates. The most effective H&S budgets allocate resources to prevention, not only reaction.

Treating training as discretionary is a false economy. When budgets are squeezed, training is often the first thing cut. But undertrained people make mistakes, and the cost of those mistakes dwarfs the cost of a course.

Ignoring mental health and well-being. Given that work-related stress now accounts for over half of all working days lost to ill health, an H&S budget that doesn't explicitly fund wellbeing provision is already behind the curve.

Failing to review mid-year. A budget set in January will face new demands by June. Building in a formal mid-year review process means you can reallocate contingency funds proactively rather than firefighting at year end.

Planning Your 2026 Health and Safety Budget

If you're building or reviewing your H&S budget right now, here's a simple framework to get you started.

Start with a baseline review of last year's spend by category, cross-referenced against your incident log and any enforcement activity. Identify where you overspent, underspent, and where gaps in provision contributed to incidents or near-misses.

Next, map your known commitments for 2026. Training renewal dates, equipment replacement cycles, scheduled audits and certification renewals. These are non-negotiable spend items that should be locked in early.

Then layer in your strategic priorities. Whether that's upskilling your team with a qualification like the NEBOSH Level 6 Diploma or NEBOSH General Certificate, implementing a new H&S management system, or expanding occupational health provision in response to rising mental health referrals.

Finally, set your contingency reserve and agree on a review cadence with your finance team.

Download Our Free Health and Safety Budget Template

To help you put this guidance into practice, we've created a free, ready-to-use Health and Safety Budget Template for 2026. It includes an annual budget summary across all core H&S categories, a monthly spend tracker, and an incident cost log, everything you need to manage your H&S finances with clarity and confidence.