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It's Cycle to Work Day: a nationwide nudge to leave the car, bus or train behind and ride in, even if only for the day. It is the ideal moment to look at the benefit behind the day, because there is a puzzle worth solving.
More people are cycling to work than at almost any point in recent memory. You wouldn't always know it from the average Cycle to Work scheme.
Cycling has become a mainstream commute. Transport for London recorded around 1.5 million cycle journeys on an average day in 2025, and the picture is similar across the country. Yet within most organisations, only 2-3% of employees actually use the Cycle to Work benefit sitting in their package.
That is a striking gap, and it is worth understanding before writing the benefit off. The easy assumption is that Cycle to Work has simply fallen out of fashion. The numbers point the other way. Interest in cycling is climbing, not falling. What is holding participation back is not the benefit itself but the way it tends to be delivered. The scheme is sound. The experience wrapped around it usually is not.
Where the experience lets people down
Employees increasingly judge a benefit by one thing: how easily they can use it. They are used to booking, buying and managing almost everything in a couple of taps on their phone, and they bring that expectation to work.
Traditional Cycle to Work rarely lives up to it. The classic journey still runs on vouchers. An employee applies, waits for sign-off, and then discovers they can only spend with a limited set of retailers, sometimes only within a set window each year. The bike they had their eye on has often sold out before the paperwork clears. And every stage creates more work for Reward and Benefits teams, who end up processing applications and fielding questions about where a voucher has got to.
None of this reflects badly on the benefit. It is the delivery model showing its age. When the process is this awkward, most people quietly give up before they have started, which is how something genuinely valuable ends up treated as a box-ticking exercise.
What low participation is really costing you
The real cost of low participation is that organisations miss out on benefits that extend well beyond cycling itself. Delivered well, and adopted widely, Cycle to Work creates value across cost, health and sustainability at the same time.
Cost that works harder. The cost of employing people keeps rising, from wage floors to pension contributions to insurance. Cycle to Work generates employer National Insurance savings of around 15% on the amounts sacrificed, and that money can be used to offset those rising costs, fund other parts of the benefits package, or ease pressure on employees' take-home pay.
That saving is about to carry more weight. Following the latest Autumn Budget, National Insurance relief on pension salary sacrifice will be capped at £2,000 per employee each year from April 2029. Cycle to Work and other salary sacrifice benefits are unaffected, so this is a sensible moment to look again at the schemes that still deliver full relief.
Healthier, more present teams. Active commuters are off sick less often. A Dutch study of over 1,200 employees found regular cycle commuters take around a day less sick leave a year than non-cyclists, with absence falling further the more often and the greater the distance they ride. With the average UK worker now taking 9.4 sick days a year (CIPD), even a small reduction hands real time back to the business.
A real sustainability contribution. Commuting is often a large slice of an organisation's Scope 3 emissions, and cycling is about the lowest-carbon way to cover it. The European Cyclists' Federation estimates a bike's full lifecycle emissions at roughly 21g of CO2 per kilometre, against around 271g for the average car: close to thirteen times lower. .
These outcomes reinforce one another. Healthier employees, lower emissions and employer NIC savings are not separate wins, they're different ways the same benefit creates value. And all of them depend on one thing: employees actually using the scheme.
Unlocking Cycle to Work's potential
This is exactly why DASH has been part of the Ben platform for years.
DASH removes many of the points of friction that have traditionally held Cycle to Work schemes back. Without vouchers or retail restrictions, employees can browse thousands of bikes and accessories from any brand or retailer, choose how they want to participate – buy outright, rent an e-bike monthly, or unlock bike-share access from just £6 per month, with providers including Lime, Forest, Santander Cycles and more.
Run through Ben, the scheme sits inside one joined-up programme rather than off to the side. That makes it simple for Reward and Benefits teams to promote, and easy for employees to find and use a benefit that too often goes unnoticed.
And it shows in participation. Employers who move to DASH typically see engagement climb to three to seven times what their previous provider delivered, and as much as tenfold in the strongest cases.
Cycle to Work Day 2026
The thinking behind Cycle to Work Day is simple: most people who try the ride once end up doing it again. That makes it the ideal moment to put the benefit back in front of your people, but the interest it sparks only converts if the scheme behind it is genuinely easy to use.
So today it is worth asking whether your Cycle to Work scheme helps employees act on that interest, or gets in the way. Get that right, and stronger uptake follows, along with the savings, lower emissions and healthier teams that come with it.
See how DASH works in Ben
DASH is fully integrated into the Ben platform, making it easy to offer a modern Cycle to Work experience alongside the rest of your employee benefits.
By removing unnecessary friction for employees and making the benefit easier to manage, organisations can unlock more of the financial, health and sustainability value Cycle to Work has always promised.
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