Tools

What standing costs, and what matting has to prevent to pay for itself

This tool will not hand you an absence-reduction percentage. Nobody can evidence one honestly. It tells you what break-even would take, and leaves the judgement with you.

Every ROI calculator in this category works the same way. It asks for your headcount, multiplies by an absence reduction percentage the vendor made up, and hands you a payback period. We are not doing that, because we have no evidence for the percentage and neither does anyone else selling matting.

So this one runs the arithmetic backwards. It costs the absence, it costs the matting, and it tells you the one number that actually matters to a decision: how many days of absence a year the matting would need to prevent before it has paid for itself. You know your site. You can judge whether that is plausible far better than we can.

Standing cost calculator

Print this page to send the working to somebody else. Every figure and every step of the arithmetic is on it.

Where every number comes from

Nothing here is a vendor statistic. The population figures are HSE, published and cited, and the assumptions we add are stated so you can change them.

Figure	Value	Source
Workers with work-related MSDs, 2024/25	511,000	HSE, Labour Force Survey
Prevalence rate	1,470 per 100,000 workers	HSE, Labour Force Survey
Working days lost to MSDs	7.1 million	HSE, Labour Force Survey
Average days lost per case	14 days	HSE, Labour Force Survey
Share of all work-related ill health cases	27%	HSE, Labour Force Survey
Working days in a year	226	Our assumption, net of statutory holiday
Employment on-cost above salary	20%	Our assumption, deliberately conservative
Kit price	The real delivered price from this site	Our catalogue

Citation: Health and Safety Executive, Work-related musculoskeletal disorders statistics in Great Britain, 2025, published 20 November 2025. Labour Force Survey, annual estimate, 2024/25. https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/causinj/musculoskeletal-disorders.htm

What this calculation does not say

It does not say that matting prevents musculoskeletal disorders. HSE attribute work-related MSDs mainly to manual handling, working in awkward or tiring positions, and repetitive work. Hard standing is not one of the named factors in that dataset, and we are not going to imply that it is.

What the ergonomics literature supports is narrower and worth stating precisely: standing still on an unyielding surface for long periods produces discomfort and fatigue in the lower limbs and lower back, and a compliant surface reduces that discomfort by allowing continuous small postural adjustments. Discomfort and fatigue are not the same thing as a reportable disorder, and the honest position is that one is a plausible contributor to the other rather than a proven cause of it.

So the output of this tool is a threshold, not a promise. If break-even needs the matting to prevent two days a year across twenty positions, most people will think that is a reasonable bet. If it needs thirty, it probably is not, and we would rather you worked that out here than after the invoice.

The arithmetic, written out

Daily cost per person = gross salary x 1.2, divided by 226 working days.
Days lost = your recorded figure if you have one. If not, standing positions x 1470 per 100,000 x 14 days per case.
Annual absence cost = days lost x daily cost.
Matting cost = delivered kit price x number of positions. One kit is one position.
Break-even days = matting cost divided by daily cost. That is the answer.

Kitting out more than five positions?

Send us the layout and the position count. We will spec it, price it, and put it in writing on something you can forward.

Ask for a written quote See all seven kits