The Burrow
Oct 28, 2025
Sick days are intended for use when you’re unwell and need to rest, but are some people using them to take a sickie? The Global Sick Day Index reveals which countries in the world see the highest rates of employees calling in sick and explores whether all these sick day requests are real or if people are looking for excuses to get out of work for the day.
To find out, our team of health insurance experts at Compare the Market conducted their own research into global sick days, using search term data around genuine and fake sick day queries to compile a global sick day index that shows where in the world people are most likely to take time off.
Find out the results below.
Starting with our global rankings, we can reveal that European countries were the most likely to take genuine sick days. Norway took the top spot with a staggering 170.24 real sick leave searches per 100,000 people. This was almost double the search volume of second-place country, Portugal, which had a total of 89.82 searches out of 100,000 people.
Ranked third for most sick day-related searches was Germany, with 86.04 searches, followed by Sweden with 81.76, and then Iceland, ranked fifth, with 75.42 searches per 100,000 residents. New Zealand was ranked sixth overall with a search rate of 75.17 per 100,000 and is the first non-European country in our index.
In contrast, for fake sick day excuses, Australia topped the list with the highest search volume rate of 11.63 queries per 100,000. Iceland was ranked second with 11.04 searches per 100,000.The United Kingdom was ranked third with a rate of 10.20 per 100,000 people searching for fake sick day excuses, followed by Canadians with a search rate volume of 7.16, and New Zealand, ranking fifth, with a search volume of 6.30 per 100,000 people.
It is interesting to note that both Iceland and New Zealand appeared in the top ten of both lists for fake and genuine sick day searches.
Notably, Japan was the only country to rank last and second last for both search sets, with 4.55 real sick day searches and 0.05 fake sick day searches per 100,000. Japan is known to have a culture of long working hours, driven by respect, loyalty, and workplace hierarchy – this may help explain the difference in attitudes toward work and sick leave.
Breaking down our findings to a country level, starting with the United States, let’s see how sick leave culture differs across the country.
Investigating which location in the US sees the highest number of real sick day queries, the results showed that Hawaii had the highest rate with 22.19 queries made per 100,000 residents. Washington followed in second with 19.83 searches, and California ranked third with 16.89 searches per 100,000 residents.
In comparison, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Mississippi round out the bottom of our table for genuine sick leave search volume, seeing only 6.71, 6.56, and 6.26 searches made per 100,000 people, respectively.
Meanwhile, for fake sick day searches, Hawaii was ranked in the top spot again, with 11.58 searches made per 100,000. This was followed by Utah, ranked second with 9.68 and Wyoming in third with 9.36 searches per 100,000 residents. Meanwhile, Ohio and Pennsylvania appear in the bottom three again with scores of 3.84 and 3.65 per 100,000 of the population. In last place was New Jersey, with the lowest number of searches per capita (3.64).
Our research into America’s sick day rates suggests that Eastern states are more likely to take sick leave than the Western and Southern states, with the opposite being true for fake sick day queries.
However, central states like Ohio and Pennsylvania appeared not to make many real or fake sick day queries, which indicates that sick day and work culture expectations across America may differ from state to state.
When examining the search volume in Canada, the city most likely to see genuine sick days being taken is Vancouver, which saw 87.50 real sick day searches per 100,000. It stands out as one of the highest search rates for all the cities and countries in our index.
The next Canadian city with a high sick day search rate was Surrey with 79.33 searches, followed by Brampton with 66.47 searches per 100,000. In contrast, the more well-known regions, such as Montreal and Quebec City, had a relatively low sick rate search volume, with enquiries on the topic sitting at 20.21 and 12.14 searches per 100,000 of the population for each city.
This trend persists when examining search rates for fake sick days. Brampton came out on top with a sizable 22.48 fake sick day searches per 100,000 people, followed by Edmonton and Calgary, with searches of 19.54 and 19.12 per 100,000 of their population, respectively.
Once again, Montreal and Quebec City have the lowest rates of sick day searches at 6.98 and 6.46 per 100,000 of the population. This suggests that the culture of work and sick leave differs in Canada’s Eastern and French-speaking cities compared to the rest of the country.
Finally, we examined how Australian states performed when it comes to calling in sick, as the nation was ranked the highest globally for fake sick day searches. Which state is the guiltiest of pulling the most sickies and which are genuinely sick?
The Australian Capital Territory ranked top for the most genuine sick day search queries with 58.14 per 100,000. This was followed by Victoria at 44.53 searches and New South Wales in third with 39.70 per 100,000 of each state’s population.
In comparison, examining which states have the highest search volume for fake sick day queries revealed that the Northern Territory has the highest number of residents pulling a sickie, with 21.63 searches per 100,000 residents. Western Australians ranked second with 16.72 searches, followed closely by the ACT with 15.90 searches and Queensland with 15.71 searches for fake sick day excuses per 100,000 of each state’s population.
On the other hand, South Australia and Tasmania report more modest figures, with South Australia showing a balanced approach to sick leave and Tasmania having the lowest rate of fake sick leave searches, indicating that employees in these regions could be more reserved in taking time off.
Steven Spicer – Executive General Manager of Health at Compare the Market, comments:
“It’s clear from our findings that more people are recognising the importance of looking after their own health and using their sick leave as intended to rest and recover. It’s interesting to see Australia rank the highest for fake sick day searches, which could imply they’re more inclined to pull a sickie.
“However, when employees do feel burnt out or unsupported, it often shows up in their absence and could reflect a deeper issue. Taking time to focus on personal wellbeing, whether through rest, self-care, or seeking professional support has never been more important. Private health insurance can support some access to professional care and help with some of the costs for services like psychology, depending on your level of cover. Compare the Market can help you save time and money by easily comparing health insurance options from a range of providers.”
To calculate our Global Sick Day Index, we first defined two keyword groups:
For non-English-speaking countries, we used a large language model (LLM) to produce natural equivalents in the local dialect, ensuring the phrasing reflected how people in that region would realistically search. This approach went beyond strict word-for-word translation and accounted for grammatical and cultural variations.
Search demand data was then gathered from Google and its partner platforms, capturing the 12-month average monthly search volume for all keywords in both groups, and for each region, we summed the average monthly search volumes across all included terms.
We then normalised these totals by population size, dividing by the number of inhabitants in each region, and scaling results to per 100,000 people, which enabled us to meaningfully compare regions of different population sizes.
Finally, we constructed our sick leave index itself by ranking regions from highest to lowest based on their per-capita search rate, with higher per-capita rates corresponding to higher index positions.
Factors and sources: