Since 6 April 2026, statutory sick pay starts on the first day of absence, not the fourth. The lower earnings threshold has gone too, so part-time, casual and variable-hours staff now qualify. For pubs, cafes, shops and care homes running on a mix of contracted and flexible hours, that means more people are owed SSP, sooner, and the amount you pay each of them depends on records most small employers keep in three different places.
What actually changed
Three things landed at once. SSP is now payable from day one of sickness, at £123.25 a week or 80 percent of average weekly earnings, whichever is lower. The earnings threshold that used to exclude lower-paid staff is gone. And statutory paternity and unpaid parental leave are now day-one rights rather than something staff earn after months on the books.
On top of that, the National Living Wage rose to £12.71 in April, adding around £900 a year for every full-time worker on the floor. UKHospitality puts the sector’s extra wage bill at £1.4bn. Labour is already 30 to 40 percent of costs in food service, so there is little room for sloppy admin.
The problem is not the law, it is where the numbers live
None of this is hard to comply with on paper. It gets hard because the inputs are scattered. The rota is on a wall or in a spreadsheet. Shift swaps happen by text. Sick days get noted on someone’s phone, then half-remembered at payroll. Average weekly earnings for a variable-hours worker can only be worked out if you have a clean record of what they actually did over the reference period.
When those records sit in separate places, three things go wrong. You underpay and create a grievance, or overpay and never notice. Payroll takes longer every month because someone is rebuilding hours from memory. And if a claim or an HMRC check ever lands, you have nothing tidy to show for it.
Fix the record before you buy anything
The job here is not new software for its own sake. It is one reliable record of who was rostered, who actually worked, and who was off and why. Plenty of UK rota tools already do this and link straight to payroll. Planday, RotaCloud and similar sit in the £10 to £30 a month range for a small team and keep hours, absence and shift changes in one place.
If you already pay for a rota or scheduling tool, the more useful move is to check whether absence logging and payroll export are switched on before you add anything else. Most of the time the capability is there and unused. Write down how a sick day currently travels from “staff member calls in” to “correct pay calculated,” and you will usually find the gap in minutes.
Get that one workflow clean and the new rules become a payroll detail rather than a monthly scramble.
If you want a clear view of where your staff, rota and payroll systems are leaking time, the free audit at digilyse.co takes about ten minutes.
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