Burnout was the most common reason for sick leave among European diplomatic service officials between April last year and March this year, and was cited in 28 percent of cases, according to a document seen by Brussels-based Politiko.
According to data obtained upon request for access to documents, 1.751 medical certificates of sick leave were registered in the European External Action Service (EEAS) during the observed period.
The European Commission's control unit, which checks the medical justification of absence from work due to illness, reviewed 263 cases, and among them, almost 28 percent were sick leave due to burnout at work.
The cases were controlled randomly or at the request of the administration, which means that they only represent a sample of all sick leave.
A senior EEAS official recently told Politiko that in 2025, around eight percent of the service's employees were on sick leave due to stress or burnout at work.
The Commission assessed that this information was "completely unfounded", adding that "such statistics do not exist, neither for the EEAS nor for the Commission, because absences for medical reasons are protected by medical confidentiality".
When asked by Politika, the Commission said that the response to the EEAS official's claim was "factually correct".
Bert Schreurs, a professor of human resources management at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), said he did not think the figure in the document was very high. "Compared to what we see in Belgium, it is lower," he added.
However, the president of one of the unions of employees in the EU institutions, Cristiano Sebastiani, said that the published figures may underestimate the problem because employees are reluctant to attribute their health problems to burnout at work.
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