Hospitality workforce stability: the UK, France and The Netherlands

If you are hiring in hospitality & catering right now, you already know keeping good people feels like an uphill battle.

What's harder to gauge is just how bad it is, and how your region compares to everywhere else.

We’ve compared sickness absence, retention and hiring-timeline data across the UK, France and the Netherlands to get a clearer picture, and honestly, a few of the numbers surprised us.

SICK DAYS

They vary more than you'd think.

UK sickness absence sits at 1.6 – 2.2% for 2025, with London running even lower at 1.5%. 

Hospitality workers in the UK average 3.7 sick days a year. 

Cross the Channel and the picture changes sharply: France's hospitality-catering sector runs at 4.5 – 6.07%, with workers taking anywhere from 10.5 to 14 sick days annually. 

The Netherlands lands in the same range.

The gap isn't really about how healthy anyone is. It comes down to contract structure and sick pay rules. 

The UK's lower rate tracks with its heavy use of hourly and flexible contracts. Workers on those arrangements often can't afford to take a day off, paid or not. France's higher rate reflects the opposite: strong statutory sick pay and a formal medical certification process that makes taking leave for illness a normal, unremarkable thing to do. 

Neither number is really a workforce health score. They're a proxy for how forgiving each country's employment structure is.

RETENTION

Still breaks down the same way everywhere

Management retention is solid across all three markets: 75–88% depending on country, meaning turnover in that layer sits in the low-to-mid double digits. 

Operational staff tell a different story entirely: retention falls to 48–65%, which means somewhere between roughly a third and half of front-line hospitality staff turnover in any given year.

France holds the edge here too, with operational retention topping out at 65% against the UK and Netherlands' 60–61%. It's the same pattern as absenteeism: stronger structural protections correlate with people staying longer, whether that's about sick pay, contract security, or both.

HIRING 

Hiring in France just takes longer. 

This is the part worth budgeting around. Front-line hiring runs 8 – 14 days in London against 14 – 21 in Paris. 

Push up to management roles and the gap widens further: London fills a role in 45–60 days, Paris takes 60–90. Amsterdam sits in between on almost every measure.

None of this is really about candidate scarcity. It's process. 

Because French employment law includes formal steps and longer notice periods by default, hiring timelines stretch out no matter how good the candidate pool is. 

What does this mean if you're hiring across borders

A single playbook won't fit all three markets

A UK-style 30-day fill target is realistic in London, tight in Amsterdam, and simply wrong for Paris. 

Expecting French-level retention from a UK contract structure sets you up to be disappointed by numbers that were never comparable to begin with.

Practical takeaways

• Budget hiring timelines by country, not by role alone
• Treat absenteeism and retention figures as a read on local labour structure rather than a scorecard