How to Ask for ADHD Reasonable Adjustments at Work

If you want an adjustment agreed, send three lines in writing to the person who can actually change it. What happens. What it costs. What would help. No diagnosis history, no apology, no potted explanation of executive function. The requests that get agreed are nearly always the short ones, because the person reading can picture themselves doing the thing you asked for.

In August the law firm Littler published its analysis of the employment tribunal figures. Disability discrimination claims up 79% on the year, making up 15% of all tribunal cases in the year to 31 March 2026, with 4,056 claims in the final quarter against 2,272 in the same quarter the year before (reported in Employee Benefits, 12 August 2026).

Every piece of coverage I read was written for employers, about legal risk. I read it and thought about the emails.

Because nobody's opening move is a tribunal. A claim is the far end of something that started a very long time earlier, with somebody sitting in their car at lunchtime, drafting a message they never sent.

Why do ADHD people write the essay instead of the ask?

Because we are building a case, and the case is really for ourselves.

I explain it to clients like this. An ADHD child picks up thousands of extra little paper cuts growing up. Sit still. Try harder. You're so bright, if only you'd apply yourself. None of them is a wound on its own. Together they teach you that wanting something different from everyone else is a thing you have to earn, and that you had better have your working out ready.

So by the time you are grown and in a job with four meetings a day, you do not ask for an agenda. You write six hundred words. The diagnosis. The waiting list. What the assessment letter said. Three paragraphs promising you are not trying to get out of anything. And then, right at the bottom, tucked into a subordinate clause, the actual request.

Across around 300 ADHD clients, this is the most common workplace pattern I see, and it goes wrong in two directions at once. Your manager opens a long message about a health condition at nine in the morning, feels out of their depth, says they will look into it, and it quietly dies. Meanwhile you have spent a weekend of your life on it and you now have a reason to never do that again.

What does a good adjustment request actually look like?

Three lines. Ten minutes.

One. What happens. Describe the thing itself in plain terms, without the label doing the work. "I lose the thread in meetings that don't have an agenda, and I miss actions."

Two. What it costs. Put it in their currency, which is time, errors and deadlines. "I've had to redo two pieces of work this month because I picked the brief up wrong."

Three. What would help. One change, specific enough that somebody can say yes to it today. "An agenda circulated the day before, and the actions typed into the chat at the end of the call."

That is the whole email. Send it to one person who can actually change it, and send it in writing, because a conversation in the corridor is not a record and neither of you will remember it the same way in March.

Keep it dull. Dull gets actioned. The moment a request reads like a defence, the person receiving it starts reading it as a complaint, and then it goes to HR instead of getting done.

Do I need a diagnosis to ask for reasonable adjustments?

No, and this trips up a lot of people who are stuck on an assessment waiting list.

Under the Equality Act 2010, a disability is a physical or mental impairment with a substantial and long term adverse effect on your ability to carry out normal day to day activities. Acas guidance is clear that an employer's duty to make reasonable adjustments arises when they know, or could reasonably be expected to know, that someone is disabled, or when a member of staff is having difficulty with part of their job because of a disability. A clinic letter is useful evidence. The thing that switches the duty on is the effect on your work.

Which matters, because adult ADHD assessment waits in parts of the UK still run into years. "Come back when you've got a diagnosis" is functionally "cope for another few years".

What if you have already asked and nothing happened?

Send the same three lines again, with the date of the first one at the top. No new argument, no more evidence, no edge to it. Most requests do not get refused, they get lost, and a polite repeat with a date on it is the single most effective thing I see clients do.

If the second one goes nowhere, that is the point to bring in occupational health, or Access to Work if you need funded support rather than a change in how your team runs. And if it still goes nowhere, hear me on this one: that is not a you thing, that is a them thing.

Being knocked back on an ask like this hurts far more than the size of the ask justifies, and if that is the bit you are stuck on, I have written separately about ADHD and hypersensitivity to criticism.

What if you work for yourself?

Then there is nobody to ask, which is not the relief it sounds like.

I ran a brand and design agency before I coached, and being the boss meant there was no adjustment request to write. So I worked later instead. Every time. By 2019 I had decided I did not want client work any more, and the honest version of that story is that I had built something with no route to ask for anything and my body eventually made the decision for me.

The three lines still work, they just change direction. What happens, what it costs, what would help becomes the shape of the conversation you have with a VA, an accountant, a business partner, or the person you keep meaning to hand something over to. It is also, and this is not a coincidence, the shape of a decent sales page. What happens to the person reading. What it is costing them. What would help. You can spend a fortnight on an about page justifying your existence, when the three sentences that actually sell you were sat there the whole time.

The bit I actually want you to take

The length of the email has never once been the deciding factor. In five years of coaching ADHD specifically, and thirteen years coaching overall, I have never seen a long request beat a short one.

If you are staring at a draft you have been rewriting since Sunday, and the real problem is that asking for anything feels like admitting something, that is workable and it is a fair chunk of what I do. Book a connection call and we can look at what it would take to get it sent.

FAQ

Do I have to tell my employer I have ADHD to get adjustments?

You have to give them enough to know you are having difficulty with part of your job for a health reason. Naming ADHD is what gives you the clearest access to formal adjustments and legal protection, and it does carry a risk of scepticism. Plenty of people start by describing the effect rather than the diagnosis and go further only if they need to.

What are reasonable adjustments for ADHD?

The ones that come up most in my sessions cost nothing. Agendas before meetings and written actions after. A named person to sanity check a brief. Deadlines agreed together rather than just landing in a calendar. Fewer, longer blocks of quiet work. Written follow ups to verbal instructions. Flexibility on start times where the commute is the thing that wrecks the morning.

Can my employer refuse a reasonable adjustment?

They can, if it is genuinely not reasonable for an organisation of that size and resource. They should tell you why, and they should consider alternatives rather than stopping at no. Get the reason in writing.

How long should an adjustment request be?

Shorter than you want it to be. Three sentences and one specific ask is plenty for a first message. You can always send more, and you will find you rarely need to.