Neck and back pain in accountants

Accountancy is desk work in its purest form: screens, spreadsheets, paper and long days that get longer at year end. You might expect a pile of studies on neck and back pain in accountants. There is not. When we searched the medical literature for this page, we found no solid study measuring how often accountants specifically have neck or back pain. Almost everything below therefore comes from research on office workers, computer users and bank employees, and is labelled that way.

What do we know about neck and back pain in accountants?

Directly, very little. Indirectly, quite a lot, because the work closely resembles other desk jobs that have been studied.

• Office workers. In a survey of 1,185 office workers from 54 workplaces, 63% had had musculoskeletal symptoms in the past year that they put down to work. The head and neck (42%) and the lower back (34%) were the most common sites, followed by the upper back (28%) and the wrists and hands (20%) (Janwantanakul et al., 2008).
• Bank employees, the closest financial group with a large body of research. A meta-analysis of 28 studies found that 67.8% of bank employees had musculoskeletal disorders, most often in the lower back (49.2%), neck (46.1%), upper back (42.1%) and shoulders (34.9%) (Marzban et al., 2024).

Banking is not accounting, and a survey of one set of workplaces is not your office. Treat these figures as a reasonable expectation for seated, screen-based finance work, not as a measurement of your profession.

What accounting adds to ordinary office work

Busy season

One thing that has been measured in accountants is the hours. In a study of public accountants at a US national firm, average working weeks rose from 49 hours before the busy season to about 63 hours during it, and burnout climbed to levels the authors said were rarely reported (Sweeney & Summers, 2002). That study looked at burnout, not pain.

What extra screen hours do to the body comes from computer-user studies. In a follow-up of 2,576 computer users, almost continual computer use was linked to more than twice the odds of developing hand and wrist symptoms (odds ratio 2.3), though it did not predict neck symptoms. Having little influence over your own work predicted both (Jensen, 2003). If you want to put a number on your own year, the sitting time calculator adds it up, and sedentary behaviour explains what researchers mean by the term.

Deadlines in the muscles

Time pressure shows up in the body quickly. In a lab study, 15 people did a text-editing task with a mouse under time pressure and verbal provocation. Heart rate, blood pressure and activity in the hand, forearm and trapezius muscles all went up, and the force on the mouse button and the wrist movements changed too (Wahlström et al., 2002). The authors could not say whether this came from the stress itself or from working faster, and a short lab session is not a month-long close.

Spreadsheets, the number pad and the mouse

Number-heavy work usually means a full-size keyboard, and the number pad pushes the mouse further out to the side. In a lab study of 30 adults, using a keyboard without a number pad, so that the mouse sat closer to the centre, gave a more neutral shoulder posture and slightly less wrist extension, with little difference in muscle activity. A mouse between the keyboard and the body was the most neutral position of all, and a keyboard on a tray with the mouse up on the desk was the least (Dennerlein & Johnson, 2006).

The UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) sums it up as keeping the mouse in line with your elbow (HSE). If you use the number pad all day, a separate keypad that you can move out of the way when you switch to the mouse is one practical option.

Working from paper

Invoices, statements and printed reports often lie flat on the desk beside the keyboard, which means looking down and back up all day. In 52 computer users, half of them with neck pain, typing from a document holder rather than a flat document reduced head movement and upper trapezius activity (Subramaniam & Singh, 2021). Forward head posture explains why the head-down position gets so much attention.

What tends to help

Set up the desk before the busy season, not during it

The HSE’s standard setup includes a seat height that supports the front and back of your thighs equally, a backrest that supports your lower back, a gap of two to three centimetres between the front of the seat and the back of your knee, and a keyboard just below elbow height (HSE). How to set up your office chair walks through it, and the desk height calculator gives starting heights for your body height.

Do not expect miracles from the furniture. A Cochrane review of 15 trials in office workers found no evidence of an effect on neck and arm problems for most physical changes to the workstation, including workstation adjustment and a sit-stand desk (one trial each) (Hoe et al., 2018).

Plan breaks into the long weeks

The law in Great Britain says employers must plan display screen work so there are breaks or changes of activity, but it does not set a length or frequency. The HSE notes that in most jobs you can stop screen work for other tasks, such as meetings or phone calls, and that where there are no natural changes, rest breaks should be planned (HSE). In busy season, a call, a walk to the printer or a review at a colleague’s desk counts.

The evidence is modest: the same Cochrane review found very low-quality evidence that supplementary breaks reduced neck, shoulder and forearm discomfort in data entry workers (Hoe et al., 2018). Microbreaks covers how often to move.

Exercise that survives the busy season

Exercise has the best evidence, for both the back and the neck. For the lower back, a meta-analysis of 21 trials found that exercise combined with education cut the risk of a new episode by about 45%; education on its own did not (Steffens et al., 2016). For the neck and shoulders, a trial in 198 working adults with frequent pain found that two minutes of strengthening a day, five days a week, reduced pain by 1.4 points on a 10-point scale after ten weeks (Andersen et al., 2011). A routine that short is easier to keep going through a busy close than an hour at the gym.

When to see a doctor

The NHS advises seeing a GP for back pain that has not improved after a few weeks of treating it at home, stops you doing your day-to-day activities, does not improve with rest or is worse at night, or comes from the top of your back between your shoulders rather than the lower back. Get urgent help if severe pain starts suddenly or gets worse quickly, and call 999 or go to A&E if it comes with numbness, tingling or weakness in both legs, loss of feeling around the genitals or anus, or changes in bladder or bowel control (NHS). The signs are explained in more detail on lower back pain from sitting and neck pain from desk work.

Where Bavelu fits

Bavelu’s short onboarding questionnaire asks where it hurts, how much, for how long and how many hours you spend at the computer, and builds a plan from that. On long days the daily session has a short version, and desk routines of two to four minutes fit between files. The sessions are designed and filmed by physiotherapists, and they are exercise guidance, not a diagnosis or treatment.