Ask most UK employers whether they support volunteering and the answer will be yes. There's probably a line in the handbook about a paid volunteering day or two. There might be a charity of the year, a sponsored run, a photo from last December's food bank shift.

But ask how many people actually used their volunteering time last year, what difference it made, or whether it shapes how it feels to work there, and the answers get a lot quieter.

That gap between offering volunteering and living it is where most organisations are. And it matters more now than it has for years, because three things are happening at once: fewer people in the UK are volunteering, employers are struggling with engagement and burnout, and public buyers are asking suppliers to prove the social value they create. Volunteering sits right in the middle of all three.

This piece makes the case that volunteering shouldn't be treated as a perk that sits in the benefits list. Done well, it's part of workplace culture itself: how people connect with each other, with their local area, and with the purpose of the organisation they work for.

A nation volunteering less

The UK has long thought of itself as a nation of volunteers, but the official numbers tell a harder story.

The government's Community Life Survey, published in December 2025, found that 17% of adults in England took part in formal volunteering (unpaid help to groups, clubs or charities) at least once a month in 2024/25. That's barely changed from 16% the year before, and a long way down from 27% in 2013/14. Before the pandemic, in 2019/20, the figure was 23%.

Two details in that data should matter to every employer:

  • Working-age adults are the least likely to volunteer. People aged 25 to 34 had the lowest regular volunteering rate of any age group, at just 11%.
  • Work is the main reason people give for not volunteering. Work commitments remain the number one barrier cited by adults who don't volunteer regularly.

Meanwhile, charities are under more pressure than ever. Rising costs, including the 2024 increase in employer National Insurance, mean many are relying more on unpaid help just as it's getting harder to find. The Royal Voluntary Service has pointed to a projected shortfall of around three million volunteers across the sector.

Put simply: the people with the least time to volunteer are the people in work, and the thing taking up their time is their job. That makes employers part of the problem, and potentially a big part of the solution.

140 million hours on the table

Here's the frustrating part: many employers already offer volunteering time. It just isn't being used.

Research by the Royal Voluntary Service and the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr), published in 2025, found:

  • 62% of businesses surveyed say they offer paid volunteering time, and over a quarter had introduced it in the previous 12 months.
  • Yet around 140 million hours of volunteering time went unused in a single year.
  • If professional and managerial staff used their full allowance, Cebr estimated the productivity gain at £32.5 billion a year, or roughly £5,239 per employee.

Why does the time go unused? The businesses themselves pointed to practical problems: not enough flexible one-off opportunities (28%), difficulty finding the right roles (21%), a lack of team activities (17%), and simply not knowing where to start (12%).

The picture from the employee side is similar. NCVO's Time Well Spent research found that most working volunteers do their volunteering in their own time, separately from their job, and that a majority of employees either say their employer offers no volunteering opportunities or don't know whether it does. Where schemes exist, they're concentrated in larger organisations.

So the problem usually isn't willingness, on either side. It's that a policy on paper doesn't become a habit on its own. A volunteering day that nobody knows about, nobody's manager encourages, and nobody can find a good use for is, in practice, not a benefit at all.

Why this is a culture question, not a benefits question

It's tempting to file volunteering under CSR or benefits. But the reasons employers are now investing in it are mostly about culture: how people feel at work, how they relate to each other, and whether they stay.

When the Royal Voluntary Service asked businesses why they'd introduced volunteering time, the top answers were tackling burnout (34%), re-engaging staff (30%) and boosting performance (25%). Those aren't charity goals. They're people goals. And they match what employees report: in the charity's 2026 research, 29% of UK workers said they felt disengaged in their jobs and 34% said they felt stressed and burnt out.

Volunteering helps with this in a few distinct ways.

It's good for wellbeing. In NCVO's research, over three-quarters of volunteers (77%) said volunteering improved their mental health and wellbeing. Research from the University of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre has linked employer-supported volunteering with better employee wellbeing too.

It builds connection across the organisation. A team morning at a community garden or a food bank puts people alongside colleagues they might never otherwise work with, often on equal footing, away from job titles and inboxes. In a hybrid world where many teams rarely share a room, that shared experience is valuable in its own right.

It develops skills people actually use. NCVO found that 55% of employer-supported volunteers used their professional skills when volunteering, most commonly management, communication and marketing, and admin. Mentoring a young person, sitting on a charity board or helping a small charity with its finances stretches people in ways a training course often can't.

It makes purpose tangible. Plenty of organisations have a values statement. Far fewer give people a regular, visible way to act on it. Volunteering turns "we care about our community" into something staff can see, take part in and talk about.

One interesting finding from NCVO is worth holding onto: people who volunteered through their employer ranked enjoyment, making a difference and a sense of achievement well above career benefits. In other words, the value to the business comes because people find it meaningful, not because it's framed as professional development. Programmes that feel like a box-ticking exercise tend to lose exactly the thing that makes them work.

The procurement shift: volunteering as evidence

There's also a harder-edged reason volunteering is moving up the agenda: public procurement.

The Procurement Act 2023 came into force in February 2025, alongside a new National Procurement Policy Statement (NPPS). Contracting authorities are legally required to have regard to the NPPS, and it makes social value a clear priority, asking public buyers to deliver social and economic value that supports the government's missions and reflects local and regional priorities. The Act also puts a stronger emphasis on making sure social value commitments are actually delivered over the life of a contract, not just promised at bid stage.

Staff volunteering is one of the most common ways suppliers deliver social value, alongside things like apprenticeships, local hiring and carbon reduction. Many small businesses already do it without realising it counts.

For any business that sells, or wants to sell, into the public sector or into large companies with public contracts, that changes the conversation. Volunteering is no longer just a nice story for the website. It's something you may need to evidence: how many hours, with which organisations, addressing which local needs, and with what result.

This is where culture and compliance meet. A programme that's genuinely part of how a business works will produce that evidence naturally. One that's bolted on for a tender tends to show its seams quickly, both to buyers and to staff.

What good looks like

The organisations that get the most from volunteering aren't necessarily the ones with the most generous policy. They're the ones that make it easy, visible and normal. A few practical principles:

1. Make it easy to say yes. The biggest barrier businesses report is finding suitable opportunities. Line up a menu in advance: a couple of team days, some short one-off tasks, and a few longer skills-based roles such as mentoring or trustee positions. People are far more likely to use their time when there's something concrete to sign up for.

2. Offer more than one way in. Some people want a sociable team day. Others want to use their professional skills over months. Others can only manage an hour or two, or need something remote. Designing for different levels of commitment widens participation well beyond the usual enthusiasts.

3. Get leaders involved, visibly. If senior people never take their volunteering days, staff quietly conclude they shouldn't either. Leaders going first, and talking about it, gives everyone else permission.

4. Protect the time. A volunteering day that has to be squeezed around a full workload isn't really a day off. Managers need to plan cover and treat volunteering time as legitimate, not as a favour.

5. Go local and build relationships. One-off events have their place, but lasting partnerships with a handful of local charities and community groups create more value on both sides. Charities can plan around reliable support, and staff see the difference they're making over time. It's also worth remembering that hosting volunteers costs charities time and effort; a good partnership respects that.

6. Share the stories. A short post about what a team did, who they helped and what they learned is often more persuasive than any internal memo about corporate purpose. Stories are how volunteering spreads from a few people to many.

7. Measure what matters. Track participation, hours and the organisations supported, and ask both staff and partners what difference it made. This keeps the programme honest, helps it improve, and gives you the evidence buyers and investors increasingly expect.

None of this requires a big budget. For small and medium-sized businesses in particular, the advantage is that it's easier to build genuine local relationships and get the whole team involved than it is in a large corporate.

From policy to practice

The UK doesn't have a shortage of goodwill. It has a shortage of time, and a lot of that time belongs to employers. With regular volunteering well below pre-pandemic levels, working-age adults the least likely to take part, and millions of paid volunteering hours going unused every year, businesses are in an unusually strong position to help turn things around.

The employers that do it well will get something back: people who feel more connected, more rested and more proud of where they work, alongside stronger local relationships and clearer evidence of the social value they create.

The question for most organisations isn't whether to offer volunteering. It's whether the volunteering they already offer is part of the culture, or just part of the handbook.

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