TL;DR: Statutory Sick Pay changed on 6 April 2026: the three waiting days are gone and the earnings threshold has been abolished, so SSP is payable from day one to every eligible employee. This guide covers what to fix in your contracts and absence policy, how SSP sits alongside company sick pay, and a full worked payroll calculation.
What actually changed on 6 April 2026
Three things are routinely reported as a single change to Statutory Sick Pay on 6 April 2026. Two of them are the reform; the third is not, and most of the coverage published since has run all three together.
The first reform change is structural. Sections 10 to 13 of the Employment Rights Act 2025, commenced by the Employment Rights Act 2025 (Commencement No. 3 and Transitional Provisions) Regulations 2026 (SI 2026/373), removed the three unpaid waiting days. SSP is now payable from the first qualifying day of a sickness absence rather than the fourth.
The second is a matter of eligibility. The same reform abolished the Lower Earnings Limit as a qualifying test for SSP. Before April, an employee earning below the limit — £125 a week in 2025/26, as Browne Jacobson's analysis of the reform sets out — received no SSP at all, no matter how long they were off. There is now no earnings floor to qualify.
The third item is the routine annual uprating of the rate, which is not part of the reform at all. SSP for 2026/27 is £123.25 a week, set by the usual uprating order and published in GOV.UK's rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027. Several vendor posts present the rate rise and the rule change as one event. They are separate mechanisms with separate legal bases, and treating them as one is how employers end up looking for a rule change in an uprating order that does not contain it.
All of this is already in force and has been since April. If your contracts, handbook and payroll configuration still assume waiting days or an earnings threshold, that is a live compliance gap today, not a project for next year. It is also not an isolated change — the Employment Rights Act 2025 has been reshaping other parts of the statutory floor too, so an SSP review is a reasonable moment to look wider.
One narrow exception is worth knowing about. Regulations 3 to 6 of SI 2026/373 contain transitional provisions for periods of incapacity that straddled 6 April 2026. If you still have a long-running absence that began before that date, check the transitional rules rather than assuming the new position applies cleanly from the start of the absence.
Who qualifies now, and what SSP is worth
The eligibility test post-reform is short. The individual must be an employee, must be absent because of sickness, and must notify the absence in line with your rules (or within the statutory default if you have none). That is it. There is no longer an earnings component. SSP is paid by the employer, not the government — it goes through payroll in the same way as normal wages, with tax and National Insurance deducted, and it cannot be reclaimed from HMRC. GOV.UK's employer guide sets out the mechanics.
The payment is where employers most often go wrong. SSP for 2026/27 is the lower of £123.25 a week or 80% of the employee's average weekly earnings. That is a two-limb test, not a flat rate with an eligibility gate in front of it. Above roughly £154 a week — that is £123.25 divided by 0.8 — the cap is the operative limb. For the newly eligible population — the low earners the reform brought in — the 80% limb almost always bites instead, and their SSP is a fraction of the headline figure.
Plenty else did not move. SSP remains payable for up to 28 weeks in a period of incapacity, and only for qualifying days, meaning the days the employee normally works. GOV.UK's Statutory Sick Pay guidance still carries both.
On scale, treat the published figures with care. The government estimated that around 1.3 million more workers became eligible once the earnings limit went, a figure reported in law-firm analysis including Browne Jacobson's, rather than one traceable to a published primary impact assessment. Acas, in its statutory sick pay changes 2026 guidance, cites a government estimate of roughly £450m a year in additional employer cost, or about £15 per employee across the affected population. Both are estimates, and the per-employee average in particular will tell you very little about your own exposure.
A worked payroll example: SSP for a newly eligible low earner
This is the part that almost nobody publishes end to end, so here it is in full. The method follows GOV.UK's guidance on calculating SSP manually; the numbers below are constructed to illustrate it, not lifted from a source.
Take Priya, a part-time retail assistant paid monthly. She works Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays — three qualifying days a week. Her gross pay in the two months before she fell ill was £520 and £544. Under the old rules she earned below the Lower Earnings Limit and would have received nothing at all. She is off sick for four working days.
Step 1 — find the relevant period. The relevant period is the eight weeks (for a monthly-paid employee, the two monthly pay periods) ending with the last normal payday before the sickness began. For Priya that is the two months above.
Step 2 — calculate average weekly earnings. For monthly-paid staff, add the pay in the relevant period, divide by the number of months, multiply by 12 to annualise, then divide by 52.
£520 + £544 = £1,064 £1,064 ÷ 2 = £532 a month £532 × 12 = £6,384 a year £6,384 ÷ 52 = £122.77 average weekly earnings
Step 3 — apply the two-limb test. Compare 80% of AWE against the weekly rate and take the lower.
80% of £122.77 = £98.22 The cap is £123.25 £98.22 is lower, so Priya's weekly SSP is £98.22.
Priya's entitlement is not £123.25. The 80% limb determines it, and it will do so for most of the newly eligible population.
Step 4 — convert to a daily qualifying rate. Divide the weekly figure by the number of qualifying days in that week. Priya has three.
£98.22 ÷ 3 = £32.74 a day
Both figures in this article happen to divide cleanly, which most will not. An employee on the capped £123.25 with three qualifying days gives £41.0833 a day, and the fractions of a penny carry through to the multiplication in Step 5 rather than being tidied away at this point. Check GOV.UK's manual calculation guidance for the daily rates it publishes before you settle on how your own payroll rounds.
Step 5 — multiply by qualifying days absent, from day one. Four qualifying days, no waiting days deducted.
£32.74 × 4 = £130.96 gross SSP
Before April, Priya would have received nothing at all — she failed the earnings test outright. Even for an employee who passed it, three of these four days would have been unpaid waiting days, leaving a single payable day rather than four.
Now the contrast. Take Daniel, full-time on five qualifying days a week, with average weekly earnings of £610. 80% of £610 is £488, which is well above the cap, so his weekly SSP is the capped £123.25. Divided by five qualifying days, that is £24.65 a day. Four days off gives £98.60. Same reform, opposite limb of the test. Check which limb applies before you calculate — the arithmetic diverges immediately after that decision.
How SSP interacts with your company sick pay scheme
The governing principle has not changed: you can always pay more than SSP, and you can never pay less.
Where a contractual or occupational sick pay scheme pays at or above the SSP rate for a given qualifying day, that contractual payment discharges the SSP obligation for that day. SSP does not sit on top of it. GOV.UK's employer guide sets out the same position. Most well-drafted schemes already work this way, but the drafting has to say so, which is the subject of the next section.
What the reform does raise is a design question. If your own scheme carries its own waiting-day provision — three unpaid days, say, mirroring the old statutory position — it now sits above a statutory floor that has moved beneath it. An employee in their first three days of absence is entitled to SSP whether your scheme pays anything or not. A scheme with its own earnings qualification has the same problem. Both need auditing rather than assuming they still align.
Then there is the population question. Low earners who were previously outside SSP altogether are frequently also outside the company scheme, because schemes are often written around the same earnings or contractual-hours logic. Extending your scheme to them is now a smaller marginal step than it was, since they already receive a statutory payment. On the cost side, the marginal figure is no longer the full scheme rate but the gap between it and the SSP you are now paying anyway, which for a low earner on the 80% limb is narrower than the headline scheme rate suggests. On the other side is the explaining: a two-tier arrangement in which some staff get company sick pay and others get only the statutory minimum is harder to justify to employees, and to the line managers fielding the question, now that everybody receives something. The economics vary enormously by workforce shape, and there is no honest general answer. Model it on your own headcount.
One recurring scheme-design error is worth naming: statutory annual leave continues to accrue throughout sick leave regardless of how long the absence runs, and can be taken during it. That is untouched by the reform and still catches out policies that treat long-term sickness as a pause on everything.
The contract and absence policy wording you need to fix
Updating the wording is the step that gets deferred, so here is a starting point — and it is a starting point for your own legal review, not legal advice.
Strike the waiting-day clause. Wording along the lines of "The first three days of any period of sickness absence are unpaid" now states a superseded rule. Replace it with something that reflects the statutory position and your own scheme, for example: "Statutory Sick Pay is payable from the first qualifying day of sickness absence, subject to the statutory eligibility and notification requirements."
Strike any earnings qualification. Clauses conditioning sick pay on earning above the Lower Earnings Limit, or on any equivalent threshold, no longer describe SSP eligibility. If you intend an earnings condition to apply to your company scheme rather than SSP, say so explicitly, and be certain the scheme still pays no less than SSP for every qualifying day.
Phrase the offset correctly. The clause that stops you paying twice is short and should be unambiguous: "Any company sick pay is inclusive of, and not in addition to, any Statutory Sick Pay due in respect of the same qualifying day." Vague formulations — "sick pay includes SSP where applicable" — invite the argument you are trying to avoid.
The contract is not the only document. Check the absence policy, the staff handbook, offer letter templates, manager guidance notes, and the payroll system's own configuration. It is easy to update the contract and leave the handbook contradicting it.
Do not treat this as tidying. A contractual clause that repeats a rule the statute has abandoned still creates an expectation, and an employer who has told staff in writing that the first three days are unpaid may find that harder to walk back than a simple legal correction implies. If you are auditing this properly, it is a sensible moment to look at how your core HR processes hold up under scrutiny more broadly.
Single sick days now carry a payroll consequence
The waiting-day change has a second-order effect that is easy to miss. With three waiting days, SSP realistically only engaged on absences of four or more consecutive qualifying days. A one-off sick day was an attendance matter and nothing else — it never reached payroll as a statutory payment.
That is no longer true. A single qualifying day of sickness absence is payable from day one. So is a single day for someone on a phased return working Monday, Wednesday and Friday who is off sick on one of those three. The daily qualifying rate calculation in the worked example above applies to a one-day absence exactly as it does to a four-day one.
Operationally, that puts weight on absence reporting it did not previously carry. Short-notice absence has usually been recorded to fill a rota, not to feed payroll, and the two systems often do not talk. If a manager notes an absence in a scheduling tool and nowhere else, the SSP due for that day will simply not be paid.
It also changes the texture of attendance management. Trigger points, return-to-work interviews and Bradford-factor-style scoring were designed around patterns of short frequent absence that had no direct pay consequence. Those absences now have a cost line, which sharpens the case for the process and, equally, raises the stakes if the process is applied inconsistently.
The weak link is nearly always manager training. The person who records the absence is not the person who runs the payroll, and they have no reason to know that the rules moved in April unless somebody tells them.
A practical compliance checklist for HR directors
- Audit for newly in-scope employees. Identify anyone whose earnings sat below the old Lower Earnings Limit — £125 a week in 2025/26 — and confirm they are now being treated as eligible.
- Reconfigure payroll and HR systems for day-one payment and the removal of the earnings test. Confirm your provider has actually applied both. Do not assume a software release note covers it; run a test case.
- Update the wording in contracts, the absence policy and the handbook, using the offset and day-one clauses above as a starting point for legal review.
- Brief line managers on why a single sick day now matters, and make sure absence reporting reaches payroll rather than stopping at the rota.
- Tell employees, particularly the newly eligible group, before they find out from a payslip. A short, plain explanation of what they are now entitled to prevents a queue of individual questions later — this is exactly the kind of thing well-implemented employee self-service is good at absorbing.
- Budget from your own numbers. The government's estimate, cited by Acas, of roughly £450m a year and about £15 per employee describes a national population, not yours. Multiply your own affected headcount by your own average daily rate.
- Check the transitional provisions if any absence that began before 6 April 2026 is still running.
Work through this against your own contracts, handbook and payroll configuration this week, starting with the employees who sat below the old earnings threshold. They are the group whose entitlement changed most, and the group least likely to ask.