Healthy employees, lower absence: what does the research actually say?

Healthy employees are not a perk. They are an operating variable.

That is exactly what a supplier of wellbeing schemes would say. So let us take the numbers first and the sales pitch afterwards. Or preferably not at all.

What does absence actually cost in Denmark?

Statistics Denmark put sickness absence in 2024 at 4.1 percent of working time across all sectors. In the private sector the figure is lower, 3.3 percent, and it is the lowest of any sector. That does not sound like much. But 3.3 percent of a working year is roughly seven to eight working days per employee, and for a company of 50 people it means one and a half people are absent at any given moment.

The arithmetic is not only the lost salary. It is cover, tasks that slip, colleagues who absorb the work, and deadlines that move. The indirect costs are usually larger than the direct ones, and harder to see, because they are not written down anywhere.

Source: Statistics Denmark, Absence from work 2024

Is there evidence that exercise brings absence down?

Yes, but it is worth being precise about how strong it is.

The most concrete measurement comes from an American study by Losina et al., published in PLOS ONE in 2017. 292 employees wore an activity tracker for 24 weeks, and the researchers compared their actual activity levels against their sickness absence. The result split sharply:

• Those meeting the guideline of at least 150 minutes of activity per week lost an average of 5 hours of work to illness.
• The moderately active, 75 to 149 minutes a week, lost 11 hours.
• The least active, under 75 minutes a week, lost 19 hours.

After adjusting for age, sex, BMI and other health factors, the least active group had a 3.5 times higher rate of illness-related absence than the most active.

Source: Losina et al., PLOS ONE, 2017

That is a strong signal. But it is 292 people, not 292,000, and it is an association rather than proof of cause. People who train regularly also differ from people who do not, in ways a study does not capture. We think the number is worth knowing. We do not think it is worth overstating.

We have read the literature on workplace physical activity, and it is thinner than most suppliers make it look. There are good individual studies. There is no solid Danish figure for the return on a corporate fitness scheme. If somebody presents you with one, ask where it came from.

Why this is a problem here in particular

Because most Danes do not move enough. The Danish Health Authority recommends that adults aged 18 to 64 are physically active for at least 30 minutes every day. The National Health Profile found in 2021 that 58 percent of adult Danes do not meet the WHO minimum of 150 minutes per week.

Which means: the majority of your employees sit in the group that, in the Losina study, lost three and a half times as much working time. That is not an argument for pushing anyone into a gym. It is a description of how wide the gap is between what is recommended and what actually happens.

Why company schemes work better than good intentions

The usual barrier is not motivation. It is friction.

A gym membership ties you to one place. If you want to swim, climb and lift, that is three subscriptions in three buildings, and it quickly passes 1,000 kroner a month. So most people settle for one, use it in February, and drift away from it in March.

A corporate sports card removes three things at once:

1. The price. The employer pays, and the employee pays only the tax on the value.
2. The lock-in. One card opens several kinds of venue, so a bad week at the gym does not mean a wasted month.
3. The decision. You do not have to weigh up a subscription every time. You just go.

It is the same mechanism that has made the model widespread across the rest of Europe. It has simply never properly arrived in Denmark in that form.

What it costs the employee in tax

This should be said out loud, not discovered on a tax return.

An employer-paid training card is a taxable staff benefit, and its value is taxed for the employee like salary. The threshold for private staff benefits is 1,400 kroner per year in 2026, and once it is exceeded the entire amount is taxed, not only the part above it. A sports card is above the threshold. It is handled automatically through payroll, so the employee has no form to fill in.

This is true of virtually every wellbeing benefit on the market. We do not give tax advice, so ask your own accountant about your situation. We have written the whole thing out in our guide to tax and payment.

How we would approach it ourselves

If you are considering a scheme, these are the three things that in our experience decide whether it gets used or merely paid for:

• Offer it to everyone, not only to the people who already train. Enrol only the active and you get an expensive scheme for people who would have trained anyway. The breadth is the entire point.
• Say the tax out loud from day one. The awkward conversation in March costs more than the honest one in January.
• Measure usage, not sign-ups. How many have used the card at least once in the last 30 days? That number tells you everything.

Who is writing this

SportPas is building a corporate sports card in Aarhus. We are still assembling the network of partner venues, and we are early. That also means we have no big number to boast about yet, and that we would rather write something true than something impressive.

If you want to see what a scheme would look like at your company, you can create a free company account and see it without talking to a salesperson. And if you run a training venue in Aarhus, we would very much like to hear from you.