How to Ask for Migraine Accommodations at Work

You’ve taken four sick days in three months and you can feel them being counted. The request that works is small, specific, and framed around what keeps you working: name three or four concrete changes, bring a record of how often attacks actually happen, and leave most of your medical history out of it. Below is how to do each part, including the sentence to open with.

Decide how much you’re going to say

The Migraine Trust is direct about this: “It’s your choice whether to tell your manager, employer or colleagues about your migraine.”

There’s a catch worth understanding before you choose silence. In the UK, an employer’s duty to make changes only bites once they know, or could reasonably be expected to know, that you have a disability. Say nothing and there is nothing to be reasonable about. Their guidance also notes that where migraine is classed as a disability, the law protects you from discrimination at work.

That’s UK law, and the rules differ elsewhere, so check what applies where you are before leaning on any of it. In the US the lever is usually protected leave rather than adjustments, and what the FMLA certification form actually asks for is a different document backed by different evidence. The practical point survives the jurisdiction: an undisclosed condition is an unmanageable one, and “I get bad headaches sometimes” is not a disclosure anyone can act on.

You don’t owe anyone your diagnosis history, your medication, or a symptom list. What makes the request work is frequency and impact, not detail.

Ask for changes, not for understanding

The most common mistake is going in to explain migraine and coming out with sympathy and nothing else. Sympathy expires. A written adjustment doesn’t.

Pick three or four of these and name them:

• Lighting. A desk lamp, and the strip light above your desk switched off. Flickering overhead lighting is one of the most common workplace problems, and it’s usually the cheapest thing to fix.
• A room you can use for twenty minutes without booking it or explaining why. Catching an attack early somewhere dark is sometimes the difference between finishing the day and losing two.
• Flexible start time, so a bad night becomes a late morning rather than a lost day.
• Camera-optional meetings as a standing rule rather than a favour asked for each time, plus decisions written down so a missed meeting isn’t a missed decision.
• Screen setup. Anti-glare filter, brightness under your own control, and a seat that doesn’t face a window.
• Scent. Plug-in air fresheners and a colleague’s diffuser near your desk are worth quietly raising.

If it helps to know what the other side of the table is being told, the same adjustments appear in the version of this written for managers. Reading it is useful preparation, because it tells you which asks a reasonable manager already expects.

Bring frequency, not a diagnosis

Here is what changes the conversation: a number.

“I get migraines” invites a judgement about how bad they might be. “I’ve had eleven attacks in the last ninety days, seven of them starting before eleven in the morning, and four cost me most of a working day” is a fact pattern, and it makes the flexible-start request obviously sensible rather than a preference.

You need three months of ordinary logging to have that, which means starting before you need it. Record four things per attack and nothing more: the date, severity out of ten, roughly how long it lasted, and what it stopped you doing. The printable migraine diary covers it on paper with no account required. Migraine Journal produces the same summary from about a minute of logging per attack, which matters mostly because you’re least likely to write anything down on the days that count most.

Take the summary, not the log. Nobody in HR is reading ninety rows.

The sentence to open with

Ask for a short private conversation, and open on logistics:

“I have migraine attacks, a few times a month. I want to keep them from affecting my work, and there are three or four small changes to my setup and hours that would help. Can I walk you through them?”

That does four things at once. It names the condition without inviting a medical discussion, gives a frequency, states the goal as your work rather than your comfort, and ends on a question they can say yes to.

Then send it in writing afterwards. Four bullets, the frequency figure, and what you agreed. An adjustment agreed verbally and never actioned is the most common outcome of a conversation that felt like it went well. If you’d rather put the request itself in writing, the accommodation letter template is built to get a yes.

If the answer is no

An employer can decline on grounds of cost or feasibility, or because a change would fundamentally alter the job. The Migraine Trust’s guidance is that even then there remains an obligation to look for other ways to support you, which is the sentence to quote back.

So ask for the alternative rather than relitigating the refusal. “I understand a fixed later start doesn’t work for the team rota. What could work instead on the mornings I’ve been up since three?” A manager who says no to everything, in writing, has given you something more useful than a yes: a record. That’s the point at which HR, a union rep, or in the UK an employment tribunal becomes the next step rather than an overreaction.

Between now and any of that, there are the ordinary bad mornings — and the message to send when you’re calling in sick with a migraine matters more than it sounds, because naming migraine rather than “not feeling well” is what makes the pattern legible later.

The part people skip is the boring one. Start the three-month record now, while nothing is wrong, so that the request you eventually make is a spreadsheet rather than an argument. The rest of the migraine-at-work guides cover the letter itself and the manager’s side of the table.