What's 2025R2 all about?

Read time: 5.5 minutes

Data and analysis refreshed as of Wednesday August, 13, 2025.

Hey there! Mia here. Workday releases can feel overwhelming 😵‍💫 For both newbies and veterans alike!

Release prep gets added to your already busy day-to-day, and suddenly...

You’re feeling a lot like Michael Scott trying to keep Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton office from spiraling into panic 😳

Well, today’s newsletter is here to help ease any release-induced overwhelm you and your team may feel.

Last Wednesday, Workday released their 2025R2 documentation on Community. So, in today’s newsletter, we’re breaking down the upcoming release!

What’s 2025R2 all about? And how does it actually impact (or NOT impact!) your Workday?

Release uncertainty makes things feel heavier than they are—so let’s unburden you with some 2025R2 demystification 😎

2025R2 Release Notes by type…

If you pull the 2025R2 Release Notes from Community today, you’ll find 570 items consisting of Features, Fixes, Retirements, and Coming Soon notes.

Workday buckets each Release Note into 1 of the 4 following “Release Note Types”…

1. Features: New or significantly updated functionality. This is the meat of the release! Features are either automatically available, or require additional setup and/or opt-in.

2. Fixes: Updates that fix broken or buggy existing functionality. These are automatically available.

3. Retirement: Removal of existing functionality. Workday phases out old components as of a predetermined retirement date. Out with the old, in with the new!

4. Coming Soon: Announcements for upcoming functionality. These items are recategorized as Features when Workday is ready to deploy them.

Here are 2025R2’s 570 Release Notes broken out by type…

The majority of your release testing focuses on new Features.

As of August 13th, Features make up 65% of all 2025R2 Release Notes, however, this is likely to change over the next several weeks…

Workday adds Release Notes every Wednesday and Friday leading up to the release delivery date. Typically, the majority of Features are added to the Release Notes the day official documentation becomes available on Community (Wednesday, August 6th).

Over the next few weeks, you can expect Workday to add a handful of Features and an onslaught of Fixes to its 2025R2 Release Notes.

Now, let’s dive deeper 🤿

Making Release Note categorization make sense…

Workday’s Release Notes don’t categorize items by the broad product areas that most of us are familiar with…

Instead, Workday lists one or more sub-categories under a “Products” heading on each Release Note. Workday has used a whopping 102 sub-categories in its 2025R2 categorization effort so far. Frankly, this level of specificity can make it difficult to understand which product area a Release Note actually impacts.

In case you were curious 😜 Here’s how Workday categorizes Release Notes using its product and sub-category groupings…

We don’t know about you, but this list makes us dizzy 😵‍💫

So, to help clarify and contextualize what’s included in 2025R2, we bucketed all 570 items into 20 broad, recognizable product areas…

• Absence

• Adaptive Planning

• Analytics and Reporting

• Benefits

• Compensation

• Core HCM

• Financial Management

• Integration

• Learning

• Payroll

• Platform and Product Extensions

• Recruiting

• Scheduling

• Spend Management

• Student

• Talent Management

• Time Tracking

• Workday Extend

• Workday Peakon Employee Voice

• Workday VNDLY

A bit more digestible, right? It certainly helps us wrap our heads around the release more easily!

2025R2 by product area…

Using Well Built’s product categorization to more easily capture the essence of 2025R2 at a glance, here are 2025R2 Features broken out by product area…

This view alone provides a great deal of demystification! 🌤️

Immediately, you can see, Workday focused most of its product development on Financials, Payroll, and Student. Together, these items make up 44% of all 2025R2 features revealed thus far.

It’s worth mentioning… Workday also focused most of its attention on FIN, PAY, and STU the last few releases. However, compared to 2024R2 and 205R1, Core HCM and areas like Talent, Compensation, and Absence did get more love this release 😍 That translates to: Workday is committed to improving their core products, and that feels good!

Most importantly, with this view, you can also gauge what percentage of the features are relevant to your organization.

For instance, if you don’t use Financials or Student, you can remove 114 features (nearly a THIRD of all Features so far!) from your test list.

Seeing features by product area also helps you gauge the workload your product area owners will bear. This release, your Financials and Payroll leads have a lot to get through! Meanwhile, the load is lighter for your Benefits, Learning, Time Tracking, and Recruiting leads.

Zooming out a bit, we also took a look at the breakdown of Release Note types within each product area…

For now, the majority of Release Notes across the board are Features. But we’ll warn ya—don’t get too attached to this view. It will change over the next several weeks as Workday publishes more Release Notes, the majority of which will be Fixes.

2025R2 setup effort…

This may be the most important release Feature variable to assess…

Setup effort! Does the Feature require setup or opt-in, or is it automatically available? Here’s the breakdown so far for 2025R2 👇

The breakdown of Setup Required versus Automatically Available is almost 50/50 this release.

Here’s how that breaks out within each product area…

Why does this matter?

Setup effort impacts your testing strategy. If a feature is automatically available, testing is a higher priority since you can’t control if/when it goes into Production. When a feature requires setup or opt-in, you have leeway to tailor test prioritization to your organization.

This view doesn’t just help you assess testing effort for each product area—it also helps you assess testing timeline. Based on the number of features that are automatically available versus require additional setup, how much time should product area owner budget for testing?

Last release, nearly two thirds of Features were available automatically. This release, with more features requiring setup across the board, your pre-release testing should be a bit more relaxed 😌

📊 📊 📊

Seeing the release summarized and broken down from these different angles helps us wrap our heads around where Workday is taking its products—and consequently, where Workday is taking all of us.

We hope this analysis was both fun and interesting, and gives you and your team a solid understanding of what 2025R2 actually consists of!

In next week’s newsletter, we’ll dive deeper into 2025R2’s Core HCM Features. Stay tuned! 💃🏻

🧼 A few days left to tidy up…

A few weeks ago, we shared everything you need to know to prep your Workday tenants for the release. There’s still time to complete your round 1 checklist in PROD if you haven’t already—you’ve got until Friday, August 15!

🎁 Send us an email with the subject 2025R2, and we’ll send you Well Built’s (new and improved!) downloadable 2025R2 Feature Release Checklist Excel doc.

Or, you can also find Workday’s version of the checklist buried at the bottom of this Community page.

As always, thank you for being a reader!

We’re celebrating you and your pursuit of a Well Built Workday 🥳

Until next time!

Mia & Ceci

Co-Founders of Well Built Solutions

P.S. Loving the newsletter? Leave us a testimonial here 🥰