28% of EU Workers Report Work-Related Muscle Pain: Reading the 2025 OSH Pulse Numbers for Home Offices

9 July 2026 · Workplace health

The EU-OSHA OSH Pulse 2025 survey puts hard numbers on the everyday aches of desk work — here is what the figures say, and which of them a home-office setup can realistically influence.

What the 2025 OSH Pulse survey actually found

The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) ran its OSH Pulse worker survey again in 2025, asking employees across Europe which health problems in the past twelve months were caused or made worse by their work. Four answers stood out: 37% reported overall fatigue, 35% headache and eyestrain, 29% stress, depression or anxiety, and 28% bone, joint or muscle problems. These are self-reported figures, not clinical diagnoses, and a worker can appear in more than one category. That caveat matters — but the pattern is consistent with two decades of EU-OSHA data showing musculoskeletal complaints as the single most common work-related health issue in Europe.

Musculoskeletal pain is the quiet constant

That 28% headline sits inside a longer-running finding: across successive EU surveys, roughly three in five workers report some musculoskeletal complaint, most often in the lower back, neck and shoulders. Desk work is not the highest-risk occupation — manual and repetitive-movement jobs carry more load — but sustained sitting, fixed postures and a screen at the wrong height are among the setup factors research associates with neck and back discomfort. The evidence does not say a chair fixes pain; it says a seat that supports the lumbar curve and lets your feet rest flat removes some of the mechanical reasons to slump. This is a comfort-and-setup observation, not medical advice.

Which of these numbers a home desk can influence

Not all four complaints respond to furniture, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. Stress, depression and anxiety are driven mainly by workload, autonomy and job design — a monitor arm will not touch them. But the musculoskeletal and eyestrain figures overlap with things a home setup genuinely shapes: screen height, viewing distance, and how far you reach for the keyboard. Getting the top of the screen roughly at eye level and about an arm's length away is standard ergonomic guidance, and a monitor arm or riser is simply the mechanism for holding that position instead of stacking books.

Fatigue, headache and eyestrain: the 37% and 35%

Overall fatigue (37%) and headache and eyestrain (35%) were the two most reported problems in OSH Pulse 2025. Eyestrain in particular has a mundane, addressable component: screens that are too low force a bowed neck, and poor task lighting makes the eyes work harder against glare and contrast. General ergonomic advice is to light the task, not the screen — a dedicated bar light or desk lamp reduces reflections and the constant re-focusing that tires the eyes. This is framed as a comfort and setup factor, not a treatment or medical advice; persistent headaches warrant a proper eye test and a look at working hours.

The reach zone: wrists, forearms and feet

Beyond the screen, the other setup factor research links to upper-limb discomfort is repetitive hand and arm movement — EU-OSHA data has long put the share of European workers doing repetitive hand or arm work at over half. At a home desk that shows up as wrists bent up over a laptop and forearms unsupported. A neutral wrist position, a stable surface under the forearm, and feet flat on the floor or a footrest are the small mechanical details that keep a long day from concentrating strain in one joint. None of these are cures; they lower the number of hours spent in awkward postures.

A calm way to read the statistics

The honest reading of OSH Pulse 2025 is that discomfort at work is common, that it is multi-causal, and that a home office influences some of it and none of the rest. Furniture and accessories address the mechanical share — posture, screen position, reach and lighting — while workload and job design sit outside what any desk can solve. Treat a setup change as removing avoidable strain rather than as a remedy, notice whether a specific ache eases over a few weeks, and see a professional for pain that persists. Nothing here is medical advice; it is a way to read the numbers and act on the part a desk can reach.

FAQ

Sources

• OSH Pulse 2025: Mental health at work (infographic) — EU-OSHA
• OSH Pulse Worker Survey — EU-OSHA
• Musculoskeletal disorders — EU-OSHA themes
• Introduction to musculoskeletal disorders — OSHwiki, EU-OSHA