One week off with flu used to cost a low-paid shift worker three unpaid days before Statutory Sick Pay even kicked in. As of 6 April 2026, it doesn't. The three-day waiting period is gone, the £125-a-week earnings floor that shut out the lowest earners has been scrapped, and roughly 1.3 million workers who had no entitlement to SSP before now do. It's the biggest change to sick pay since the scheme was overhauled in 1985, and it arrived quietly, tucked inside the wider rollout of the Employment Rights Act 2025. For four decades the basic shape of SSP barely moved, surviving recessions, the temporary pandemic-era adjustments of 2020, and years of pressure from unions and the Low Incomes Tax Reform Group to close the gaps it left for the lowest earners. Parliament finally rewrote it wholesale, and the rewrite landed with less fanfare than the headline zero-hours and unfair-dismissal reforms sitting in the same Act, despite touching nearly every payslip in the country.
If you're an employee, the headline is simple: you get paid from the first day you're too ill to work, not the fourth. If you run payroll, the headline is less simple, because the new calculation isn't a flat rise — it's a formula that pays some people more than the old flat rate and caps others exactly where they were before. Understanding which side of that line you fall on matters more than the "day one" slogan suggests.
The three days that used to cost you money
Under the old rules, SSP only became payable on the fourth day of a sickness absence — the first three were "waiting days" and went unpaid regardless of how long you'd worked somewhere or how genuine the illness was. A worker on minimum wage calling in sick for a three-day bout of norovirus simply lost that income outright, no top-up, no backdating. The Employment Rights Act 2025 abolishes waiting days entirely from 6 April 2026: SSP is now payable from the first qualifying day of absence.
That change alone matters more to people with short, repeated absences — carers managing a child's chickenpox, warehouse staff with recurring back strain — than to someone on long-term sick leave, where the three unpaid days were always a small fraction of the total time off. Which is worth saying plainly: the reform helps short-term sickness far more than it helps serious, extended illness. Anyone expecting a transformative change to long-term disability income will be disappointed — that's a different fight, fought through Universal Credit and Access to Work, not through SSP.
Who actually gained a right they didn't have
One point three million workers gained a legal entitlement to sick pay on 6 April 2026 that they simply didn't have on 5 April.
That's the removal of the Lower Earnings Limit, and it's the more consequential of the two changes. Previously, you had to earn at least £125 a week on average to qualify for SSP at all — below that threshold, whatever the reason, you got nothing. That excluded a large slice of the part-time, multiple-job, and zero-hours workforce almost by design, since low weekly earnings are exactly what those contracts produce. From 6 April 2026, every employee paid through PAYE is eligible for SSP regardless of how little they earn. A retail worker doing twelve hours a week across two jobs, previously locked out entirely, now has a statutory right to sick pay from either employer.
The 80% rule that isn't as generous as it sounds
Here's where the reform gets more interesting than the press coverage suggested. SSP is no longer a single flat weekly rate for everyone who qualifies. From 6 April 2026, an employee receives whichever is lower: 80% of their average weekly earnings, calculated over the eight weeks before the absence began, or the new flat rate of £123.25 (up from £118.75). For anyone earning comfortably above the flat rate — a full-time employee on £30,000 a year, say — 80% of their weekly earnings comfortably exceeds £123.25, so they're capped at the flat rate exactly as before. The reform doesn't touch their payout at all.
The people who actually see a change are at the bottom of the earnings scale, and even there it's a mixed picture. Someone whose average weekly earnings work out at £100 gets 80% of that — £80 — rather than the old flat rate they'd never previously qualified for anyway, so £80 a week is a genuine improvement over zero. But someone earning £140 a week, just above the old threshold, now gets £112 (80% of £140) instead of the £123.25 flat rate they'd have received under the old system if they'd cleared the earnings bar. In other words, the new formula can pay a low earner less than the old flat rate would have paid them, once they're above the vanished earnings floor. It's not a design flaw exactly — the 80% cap exists so SSP never exceeds what someone actually earned, which is standard practice across most wage-replacement schemes — but it does mean the “newly eligible” framing tells only half the story for anyone sitting just above the old threshold. It's a genuinely odd outcome for a reform framed as expanding sick pay, and it's the kind of detail that gets lost between the government press release and the payslip.
What it costs the business signing your payslip
Employers are the ones absorbing the bill, and the government's own estimate puts the total increase in SSP costs at around £450 million a year across the economy — roughly £15 per employee, though that average hides enormous variation by sector. A firm with a young, salaried, low-absence workforce will barely notice the change. A care home, a warehouse operator, or a hospitality business with a large part-time and previously-excluded-earnings workforce will feel it directly, because those are exactly the staff groups who were locked out of SSP before and are now claiming it for the first time.
Payroll teams need to rebuild the SSP calculation from scratch rather than patch the old one — the eight-week average weekly earnings window, the day-one trigger, and the removal of the earnings check all interact in ways that a simple rate update won't capture. If you haven't already run a test payroll cycle under the new rules, do it before your next real one, not after an employee queries a payment that's wrong. Getting this wrong isn't a minor admin slip anymore, either.
The Fair Work Agency is watching now
The Fair Work Agency launched on 7 April 2026 with live enforcement powers, under its first chair, Matthew Taylor CBE, and SSP underpayment sits squarely in its remit alongside minimum wage and holiday pay enforcement. That's a meaningful shift from the pre-2026 landscape, where SSP disputes mostly ended up as employment tribunal claims brought by individual workers, with all the delay and legal cost that involves. An underpayment that used to be a slow-moving grievance is now something a regulator can investigate directly and act on — a real difference for a small employer weighing whether to get the calculation properly reviewed now or risk it.
Employees already receiving SSP before 6 April 2026 aren't left out of the transition, either: they're protected at the uprated flat rate of £123.25 until they return to work, exhaust the 28-week entitlement, or their contract ends, rather than being recalculated downward under the new formula mid-claim. That's a sensible piece of transitional drafting, and one of the few parts of this reform that avoids creating a cliff edge.
What to check before your next payslip
If you're an employee earning close to what used to be the £125 threshold, work out your own average weekly earnings over an eight-week window and compare 80% of that figure against £123.25 — don't assume you're automatically better off just because the rules changed in your favour on paper. If you're on a genuinely low income, multiple part-time jobs, or a zero-hours arrangement, check with each employer separately, because SSP eligibility and the earnings calculation apply per employment, not combined across jobs.
For employers, the practical move is to audit anyone whose average weekly earnings sit between roughly £100 and £160 a week specifically, since that's the band where the new formula produces genuinely different outcomes from the old flat rate, and where a payroll system running on last year's logic is most likely to get the number wrong. Everyone else — high earners capped at the flat rate, and the newly eligible earning well under £100 — is more straightforward to get right, but still worth a single test run before the first real sick-leave claim lands on your desk.