SSP changes
Proposed SSP changes are making the news at the moment. The current position is that employees qualify for SSP based upon earnings or expected earnings. The employee will qualify as long as the earnings are above the current lower earnings limit (£125 per week 2025/26 tax year). The SSP will be paid on the fourth consecutive day of sickness; there are three ‘waiting days’, at the current SSP rate (£118.75 per week 2025/26 tax year).
There are also requirements around self-declarations and fitness-to-work notes issued by the GP. SSP is paid for a maximum of 28 weeks and an SSP1 form is required at the end of that period or if an employee does not qualify.
The employer cannot claim anything against SSP payments, they are not treated the same as statutory parental leave and there is no reduction in employer’s National Insurance contributions.
The proposed SSP changes
The main changes are -
All employees will qualify as the requirement for earnings above the lower earnings limit will go.
There will be no waiting days, payments start on day 1
Employees will be paid the lower of 80% of average earnings or statutory sick pay
The employer will still not be able to claim or offset sickness payments but we expect the overall bill for employers to increase
We believe the 28 weeks maximum and requirements around notice will remain unchanged although form SSP1 will probably need updating. This is a big shift for statutory sick pay and it will be interesting to see what the final legislation will bring. In particular it will be interesting to see how to define average pay as that will obviously have a big impact in sickness payments and we are not sure what that will be for a zero hours worker that has not started yet for instance. This is unlikely to be rolled out this tax year we would hope.