Why has the recurring management of absence data become a financial decision, and not merely an HR obligation?

By Jaqueline Mello – Social Security and Labor Advisory Manager

In 2025, Brazil recorded approximately four million work absences due to health reasons, the highest volume in the past five years, according to the Ministry of Social Security. Within this figure, the data point that should most capture executives’ attention is not the total itself, but its composition: mental and behavioral disorders exceeded 546,000 disability benefit grants, representing a 79% increase compared to 2023 and consolidating a second consecutive record. Anxiety and depression now rank second among the leading causes of temporary incapacity in the country.

These numbers do not exist in isolation within Social Security reports, they manifest concretely in companies’ financial statements. Each absence exceeding 15 days generates for the employer a set of costs that are rarely accounted for in an integrated manner: the first 15 days of salary paid by the company, operational coverage of the position, overload on the remaining team, loss of productivity in the affected area and, in cases classified as workplace accidents or occupational diseases, a direct impact on the Accident Prevention Factor (FAP), with an immediate effect on the Work Accident Risk rate applied to the entire payroll. A company with a monthly payroll of BRL 1 million and a base rate of 3% may, with an FAP worsened to double, pay BRL 180,000 more per year in taxes, without any manager having realized that this cost was being built up month by month.

Each absence exceeding fifteen days carries with it a cost that is rarely accounted for in an integrated manner. The FAP transforms claims into taxation, and companies that do not manage one end up paying for the other.

The cost of corporate health plans completes this cycle. The treatment of mental disorders, psychotherapy, psychiatry, continuous-use medications, is consistently one of the highest-cost items in corporate health plans, and this cost grows in direct proportion to the volume of illnesses not identified early. The company that does not detect patterns of illness within its teams until they become absences is, in practice, funding the treatment of a condition that could have been prevented or mitigated.

The Brazilian government responded to this scenario with a significant regulatory update. Ordinance MTE No. 1.419/2024 revised Regulatory Standard No. 1 (NR-1) and formally introduced psychosocial risk factors into the mandatory scope of Occupational Risk Management, the same process that every company must already conduct for physical, chemical and biological risks. Following a 12-month guidance period, the standard enters full force with enforcement authority on May 26, 2026. From that date, the absence of documented management of psychosocial risks in the Risk Management Program (PGR) exposes the company to fines ranging from BRL 2,396 to BRL 6,708 per identified violation, and to legal exposure in labor claims that will use this history as evidence of negligence.

What the updated NR-1 requires is the adoption of a structured process for identifying and assessing working conditions that may cause illness, analysis of targets and workloads, quality of relationships between teams and leadership, and exposure to situations of pressure or violence. This process must be documented, periodically updated and integrated into the existing PGR. Not coincidentally, the absence data that HR already holds is the most efficient starting point for this analysis: recurring diagnostic codes by area, seasonal patterns of illness and correlations between turnover and mental health-related absences are signals that already exist in companies’ databases, they are simply not being read for this purpose.

The data already exists. What is missing is the process and expertise to transform it into preventive intelligence, and into an argument for financial decision-making before the cost becomes too evident to ignore.

The recurring technical analysis of absence data is therefore simultaneously an emerging legal requirement, a tool for reducing social security costs and a strategy for controlling health plan claims. Companies that structure this analysis as a continuous process, and not as a one-off response to an enforcement action or a spike in absences, gain three concrete advantages: they identify patterns of illness before they become crises, they build the documentation that NR-1 requires as a by-product of day-to-day management, and they accumulate evidence to contest, where applicable, incorrect INSS classifications that impact the FAP.

The Epidemiological Social Security Technical Link (NTEP) is the mechanism by which the INSS automatically presumes that certain diseases are linked to the company’s economic activity, based on the combination of the CNAE and the diagnostic code of the absence. When this presumption is not contested, which occurs in the vast majority of cases simply due to the absence of a process, the absence is classified as a workplace accident and worsens the FAP. A technical challenge, conducted with the support of an occupational physician, has the potential to reverse this classification and generate directly verifiable savings on the payroll. This is one of the rare points at which people management and tax management converge with numerical precision.

The right time to structure this management is the period leading up to May 2026, not because enforcement is the only motivator, but because the combination of regulatory pressure with the ongoing growth of absences creates a window of competitive advantage for companies that act first. Those that structure the process now will arrive at May 2026 with an active database, a solid PGR and indicators that demonstrate preventive action. Those that wait until the deadline will arrive under pressure, without historical data and without evidence, exactly the most vulnerable position in the face of an enforcement action, a labor claim or an FAP that has deteriorated.

Absences have always been viewed as an HR problem. The 2025 data and the new NR-1 make this view unsustainable. When an absence impacts the FAP, raises payroll costs, increases health plan claims and exposes the company to enforcement actions, it ceases to be a people management event and becomes a financial event with its origin in a decision, or in the absence of one. The question executives should be asking is not how many employees were absent this year, but what the data from those absences reveals about the risks the company has yet to see.

Sources: Ministry of Social Security · INSS · ANAMT · SmartLab/MPT-ILO (2024–2025) · Ordinance MTE No. 1.419/2024 · Ordinance MTE No. 765/2025

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