You have 18 people on the books. Four of them work part-time: a receptionist on three days a week, a cleaner doing 12 hours, two drivers who pick up shifts as the work comes in. Their weekly earnings vary. One averages £110 a week. Another averages £97. Neither used to qualify for statutory sick pay because they fell below the lower earnings limit.
On 6 April 2026, that changed.
Statutory sick pay from day one is now the legal position for every employee, regardless of what they earn per week. The three waiting days that meant a Monday call-in cost you nothing until Thursday are gone. The earnings threshold that kept low-pay, low-hours staff off the SSP list is gone. The Acas guidance on statutory sick pay changes 2026 sets this out clearly, and the government's employer campaign page carries the current rates and eligibility rules.
What neither document maps out is the coordination problem that sits between "the rule changed" and "someone in your team is actually doing this correctly." In most 10-to-30-person businesses, payroll, line management, and HR policy sit with different people, none of whom have updated how they handle sickness absence since April.
What the Employment Rights Act changed on 6 April
Three practical changes, all on the same date.
The waiting period is gone. Previously, the first three qualifying days of any period of incapacity were unpaid waiting days. SSP started on day four. Now it starts on day one.
The lower earnings limit no longer applies. Employees earning below £125 a week did not qualify for SSP before April. The government estimates around 1.3 million workers fell into that bracket. From 6 April, every one of them qualifies.
The calculation method changed. The flat weekly SSP rate is now £123.25. For employees whose average weekly earnings sit below that figure, SSP is capped at 80% of their average weekly earnings instead. A worker earning £97 a week gets £77.60 in sick pay, not the flat rate.
That 80% rule is the part most payroll processes have not caught up with. If your software calculates SSP at the flat weekly rate regardless of what that employee earns, it is already producing the wrong number for any lower-paid worker.
What does statutory sick pay from day one add to each hire?
Run the numbers for a moment.
Before April 2026, a full-time employee taking a five-day absence would trigger SSP from day four. You paid two days of sick pay at the daily equivalent of £23.75: roughly £47.50 in liability for that absence.
Since April 2026, statutory sick pay from day one means the same five-day absence costs you five days of SSP: £123. The difference per week-long absence is approximately £75 for a standard-rate employee.
For workers who previously earned below the lower earnings limit, the change is more significant. Take someone averaging nine hours a week at National Living Wage: around £114 a week. Under the old rules, no SSP at all. Now they get 80% of their average weekly earnings, which is approximately £91 a week in sick pay, from day one of any absence that spans four consecutive calendar days.
Multiply that across three or four low-hours workers each taking two absences a year and the new annual SSP exposure sits somewhere between £400 and £730. None of it was in any payroll budget set before April.
The Fair Work Agency launched on 7 April 2026, taking on enforcement of National Minimum Wage, holiday pay, and other employment rights. SSP enforcement is being transferred to the FWA in a later phase under the Employment Rights Act rollout; HMRC currently handles SSP disputes and employees can pursue underpayments through the employment tribunal. Every person you take on from this point carries that obligation from their first day.
Who in your business owns the seven-day clock?
The administrative obligation that catches most employers off guard is the SSP1 form.
When a sickness absence does not qualify for SSP, you must issue an SSP1 form within seven calendar days of the employee's first day off sick. When SSP entitlement runs out while the employee is still absent, the form must reach them within seven days of SSP ending, not seven days from when the absence started. Not working days. Calendar days.
In practice: if a team member calls in sick on a Monday and that absence turns out not to qualify for SSP for some reason, you have until the following Sunday to issue the form. Miss it and you are in breach.
Think about who owns that clock in your business. The sick call arrives by text to a line manager. The line manager may or may not pass it on to payroll. Payroll may not hear about it until the month-end run. Nobody has a seven-day countdown on anything.
The coordination chain is: employee to line manager, line manager to payroll or owner, payroll to somewhere. There is no system. There is a person who knows it needs to happen and hopes they will remember in time.
That was more forgiving when SSP did not start until day four and excluded most low-hours staff. The informal grace period is gone now. The first qualifying sick day is also the first day the compliance clock is running.
The records HMRC can ask to see
There is no statutory mandatory retention period for SSP records; that requirement was removed in 2014 and has not been reintroduced. But HMRC can request records to settle disputes, and the Fair Work Agency will take on SSP enforcement in a later phase. In practice, keeping records for at least four years gives you a defensible position against HMRC's standard enquiry window.
What the records need to contain: the date and duration of every absence, whether it was an SSP-qualifying period, the SSP amount calculated and paid, any fit notes received, any SSP1 forms issued along with the dates they were sent.
For a business with 18 employees, several of them on variable hours and earnings, this means a separate record for each person, calculated at their specific rate, across every qualifying absence. If your current absence tracking is a line in a payroll spreadsheet or an informal message to the bookkeeper, that will not hold up to HMRC scrutiny or an FWA inspection once enforcement transfers.
The regulatory question, whether a specific absence qualifies as a period of incapacity, whether a fit note is sufficient evidence, or whether a worker's employment status affects their entitlement, is for an employment solicitor or accountant. The bureau does not interpret employment law.
The operational question, how the absence gets logged on day one, how the SSP amount gets calculated at the right rate for that employee's earnings, how the seven-day SSP1 clock gets flagged before it expires, and where the records sit in a retrievable form, is a workflow problem. Most small businesses collapse both questions into one and send it to the accountant. The accountant can say what the rules require. They cannot fix the payroll system still running the old day-four calculation, or the line manager who does not know to log an absence the moment it starts.
The compliance overhead these changes create is often cited as the reason to add a part-time payroll admin or an HR coordinator. A 0.2 FTE hire in Nottingham sits at roughly £6,000 to £8,000 a year, plus the time to recruit and manage them. The bureau builds the system that makes that hire unnecessary, for a fixed fee in the low four figures.
For a business stuck on this problem, that system is an absence intake process: a form the line manager submits on the day of absence, connected to payroll data, that calculates SSP at the correct rate for that employee's earnings (flat rate or 80% depending on where they sit), raises an SSP1 task if one is due with the seven-day clock already counting and visible to whoever needs to act, and files the completed record into a structured archive that HMRC can pull on request. Payroll gets the right figure for the period without waiting for month-end.
The same system connects to the annual leave record-keeping obligation that came in on 6 April, because it involves the same employees and the same payroll data. One integrated workflow rather than two separate processes running at different speeds.
That is the shape of what the Engineering pillar builds: a system fitted to how your team already reports absences, with an HMRC-ready record archive and the annual leave obligation handled in the same workflow.
If your admin week is heavier than your customer week, that is worth a 15-minute conversation. No pitch, no deck. Just an honest look at what is taking the most time. Costs nothing to chat.