Guide
Statutory sick pay for employers: day one, and no earnings limit
Updated
This change is done, it is retrospective in nature only in the sense that stale policies keep underpaying, and it costs employers with casual or part-time staff more than any other measure in force today.
The rules now
- When it starts
- The first qualifying day of the absence. Sections 10 and 12 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 removed the waiting period on 6 April 2026 (S.I. 2026/373). The employee must be sick for at least one full working day.
- Who qualifies
- Employees, without the lower earnings limit test that applied before 6 April 2026. Sections 11 and 13 removed it.
- How much
- £123.25 a week or 80% of average weekly earnings, whichever is lower, for up to 28 weeks (gov.uk).
- Evidence
- Unchanged: a fit note is required for absences of more than seven days in a row, including non-working days.
The transitional rule for absences spanning the change
S.I. 2026/373 contains a transitional provision for employees who had served one or two waiting days on or before 5 April 2026 where the next day of incapacity fell on or after 6 April 2026. Those employees are eligible for statutory sick pay for the later day rather than losing it to a waiting day rule that no longer exists. Payroll teams that ran the change as a hard switch on 6 April may have short-changed a small number of people spanning the date: worth a check.
What employers should have changed
- The sick pay policy. Any reference to three waiting days or to a qualifying earnings threshold is now wrong.
- Occupational sick pay design. Schemes drafted to start on day four now sit oddly on top of day one SSP, and the interaction needs to be spelled out in writing.
- Absence recording. Single day and short absences now carry a cost that they did not before, so they need to be captured.
- Return to work processes. The financial disincentive to short absence has gone, which makes the management conversation, not the deduction, the tool that matters.
What has not changed
SSP is still capped at 28 weeks, still ends when the employee returns or stops qualifying, and still requires form SSP1 within the published deadlines when entitlement ends or does not arise. Linked periods of sickness eight weeks or less apart still count as linked. Company sick pay can be more generous than SSP but never less.
Employers cannot recover SSP: the percentage threshold scheme was abolished years ago and has not returned. Budget for the full cost.