Day-One Sick Pay Is Finally Here. It’s Still Not Enough.

2 May 2026 • By Tom Street, Solicitor

The first major test of the Employment Rights Act 2025 quietly arrived on 6 April. From that date, statutory sick pay (SSP) became payable from the first day of sickness absence. The three-day waiting period that’s been a feature of British employment law since the early 1980s is gone.

The lower earnings limit, which excluded around 1.3 million low-paid workers from SSP altogether, has gone too. And SSP is now calculated as the lower of £123.25 a week or 80% of the worker’s average weekly earnings, which broadens the system to people who used to fall below the threshold entirely.

It’s the most significant reform to sick pay in 40 years. And for a lot of the workers most affected by it, it changes the maths of being ill.

What’s actually changed

Three things, taken together.

The waiting days have gone. SSP is now payable from the first qualifying day of sickness absence. Before 6 April, the first three days were unpaid. For someone on a zero-hours contract or a tight budget, that often meant the difference between staying home with a chest infection and dragging themselves into work and infecting everybody else.

The earnings threshold has gone. Workers no longer need to earn above the previous lower earnings limit (£125 a week in 2025/26) to qualify for SSP. According to the government’s own figures, around 1.3 million extra workers are now covered. Most of them are part-timers, zero-hours staff, and people on irregular contracts, the workers who needed sick pay protection the most.

There’s a new payment formula. SSP is now paid at whichever is lower of two figures: the flat weekly rate of £123.25, or 80% of the worker’s average weekly earnings over the previous eight weeks. For someone earning £400 a week, the maths is simple. They get £123.25, because 80% of £400 is £320, well above the cap. For someone earning £120 a week, they get £96, because 80% of their pay is below the flat rate.

That second figure is the bit that needs attention.

The 80% rule deserves more scrutiny

The reform has been sold as expanding sick pay coverage, and it does. But the way the new rate works for the lowest earners means a lot of newly eligible workers will receive less than the headline £123.25 a week.

Take a part-time cleaner earning £140 a week. Under the old system, she got nothing for the first three days off sick, then £118.75 a week. Under the new system, she gets £112 a week (80% of £140) from day one. Better than nothing for the first three days. Worse than the headline figure she’s likely been told about.

If she’s not aware of the 80% rule, she might assume she’s being underpaid. She isn’t. But the law is doing something subtler than the press releases suggest, and there’s a real risk of confusion in the early months. Acas has produced guidance which explains the calculation, but most workers don’t read Acas guidance. Most workers just look at the headline rate, expect to receive it, and don’t. If you want to check what your own figures should look like, our SSP calculator applies the dual-rate rule for you.

The bit the headlines miss

The 80% rule and the day-one entitlement don’t change the deeper problem, which is that SSP is set at a level that doesn’t cover most people’s outgoings. £123.25 a week is around £535 a month. For most workers, that doesn’t pay the rent, let alone everything else.

That’s why a lot of workers who get seriously ill end up with two bad options. They go back to work too early, which is bad for their health and frequently makes the underlying problem worse. Or they stay off and run up debt, which is bad for everything else in their life. The reform doesn’t fix that. It just removes one of the more obviously cruel features of the old system.

For comparison, statutory sick pay in Germany runs at 100% of normal pay for the first six weeks. In the Netherlands it’s 70% for up to two years. In Sweden it’s 80% for the first 14 days then a state-funded benefit kicks in. We are, as ever, an outlier downwards.

What employers are getting wrong

A month in, it’s not uncommon to find employers who haven’t updated their payroll or their policies. The most common issues fall into three buckets.

Waiting days still being applied. If you were off sick after 6 April and your employer didn’t pay you for the first three qualifying days, that’s wrong. They owe you SSP from day one, assuming you meet the other conditions (you’ve started work, you’ve notified them in line with their policy, and you’re sick on a qualifying day).

Low earners being told they don’t qualify. If your employer says you don’t earn enough for SSP, they’re working off the old rules. The lower earnings limit no longer applies to SSP, although it does still apply to other statutory payments like maternity and paternity pay.

Wrong rate calculations. Some payroll systems are still defaulting to the flat rate of £123.25 for everyone, including those who should be getting the 80% figure. Others are doing the opposite, paying 80% to people who should be getting the flat rate. Both are wrong, and both can usually be fixed once you point it out.

There’s a fourth issue worth flagging, although it’s less about SSP and more about what comes next. If you’re off sick for any length of time, expect your employer to start managing you. Sometimes that’s appropriate. Sometimes it’s a backdoor route to dismissal. The day-one SSP rules don’t change the underlying law on capability dismissals or disability discrimination, and they don’t stop employers from using sickness absence as a pretext to push people out.

Where this leaves us

Day-one SSP is the right thing to do. Removing the lower earnings limit is overdue. The idea that 1.3 million workers had no right to sick pay because they earned slightly too little was always wrong. On both counts, the Employment Rights Act 2025 has done something useful.

But there’s a bigger argument we should be having now, which is whether SSP should be set at a meaningful percentage of normal pay, the way it is across most of Europe. £123.25 a week is, in 2026, a token gesture toward the cost of being ill. Until the rate moves, all the day-one entitlement does is bring forward the point at which workers run out of money.

This isn’t a fringe position. In its recent Ending the Pay Crisis report, the TUC called for SSP to be paid from day one (now done) and for the rate to be raised to the level of the real Living Wage (still pending). The Resolution Foundation’s Low Pay Britain 2024 analysis found that a UK worker on average pay who’s off sick for four weeks gets back roughly 11% of their previous earnings, compared to about 68% across the OECD. Its Low Pay Britain 2025 report goes further: of the OECD countries that operate a statutory sick pay system, the UK provides the lowest level of legal income protection. Only the United States and South Korea, neither of which has a statutory system at all, sit outside that ranking.

And the gap between the legal floor and what it actually costs to live is getting harder to ignore. The Living Wage Foundation calculates that a full-time worker on the new £12.71 National Living Wage will earn £1,443 a year less than they would on the real Living Wage of £13.45 (£4,076 less in London). SSP, of course, sits well below even the lower of those two figures. The day-one entitlement is welcome. The rate is still where the argument needs to go next.

That argument isn’t going to win this year. So in the meantime, the practical advice is the boring kind. Check your contract: if your employer offers contractual sick pay above the statutory minimum, use it. If they don’t, consider income protection insurance if you can afford it. And if you think your SSP has been calculated wrongly, run your figures through our SSP calculator and push back. The law is on your side, and getting your numbers right is the first step toward not being walked over.

One last point. SSP disputes don’t usually exist in isolation. If an employer is mishandling sick pay, there’s often something else going on too: pressure to come back early, capability procedures used as a backdoor to dismissal, failure to make reasonable adjustments for disabled workers, or in the worst cases, dismissal for the sickness itself. If you’re being treated badly because of a period of sickness absence, get advice early. The window to do something about it can close quickly, and the value of a successful claim can be substantial: the unfair dismissal compensatory award cap rose to £123,543 from 6 April 2026, and disability discrimination claims aren’t capped at all.