Statutory Sick Pay: UK Employer Rules Explained

What the law actually says about statutory sick pay

Start from the statutory floor. UK workers are entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid holiday per leave year — that is gov.uk holiday entitlement guidance, and it is a floor, not a target. A contract can offer more; it cannot offer less.

Two details cause most of the confusion around statutory sick pay. The first is that entitlement is defined in weeks, not days, so anyone who does not work a standard five-day week needs their own calculation rather than a share of 28. The second is that bank holidays have no automatic special status: employers may include the eight UK bank holidays within the 5.6 weeks or grant them on top, and whichever you choose has to be stated in the contract.

Acas publishes the practical guidance most UK employers rely on for edge cases, and gov.uk holds the statutory position. Where a situation is genuinely contested — long-term sickness, irregular hours, or a leaver’s final balance — those two sources plus employment advice are the right references, not a vendor blog.

A worked example: part-time pro-rata entitlement

Statutory minimum holiday in the UK is 5.6 weeks per leave year, according to gov.uk holiday entitlement guidance. The word "weeks" matters more than the word "days", because the calculation multiplies by whatever a week means for that person.

Take a full-time employee on five days a week. Their entitlement is 5.6 × 5 = 28 days, and employers are allowed to count the eight UK bank holidays inside that 28 rather than on top of it.

Now take a colleague who works three days a week. Their entitlement is 5.6 × 3 = 16.8 days. It is not 28 scaled by eye, and it is not 28 × (3/5) rounded to a comfortable number — although those happen to agree here, which is why the error often goes unnoticed until someone works an irregular pattern.

Where it goes wrong is bank holidays. If your policy says bank holidays are deducted from the allowance, the three-day-a-week employee should only lose the bank holidays that actually fall on their working days. Someone who never works Mondays would otherwise be charged for Easter Monday, the early May bank holiday, the spring bank holiday and the late summer bank holiday — four days they were never going to work. Over a year that is a real, compounding underpayment of entitlement.

The safe method: express the allowance in hours for anyone with an irregular pattern. A 22.5-hour week at 5.6 weeks is 126 hours of leave. Book against hours, and the pattern stops mattering.

The obligations that catch employers out

Three failures produce most of the disputes.

Refusing leave without proper notice. An employer can decline a specific request, but there are notice rules attached, and a pattern of blanket refusals that leaves someone unable to take their statutory entitlement is where tribunal risk starts.

Losing the paper trail. When a request was made, who decided it, what reason was given for a refusal — none of this feels important until it is the entire case. Email approvals scatter this across inboxes and it is effectively unrecoverable a year later.

Treating part-timers as a fraction. Pro-rata is arithmetic, and getting it wrong is a straightforward underpayment that compounds silently across a leave year.

None of these are exotic. They are all consequences of the record living in someone’s head or someone’s inbox.

Writing a policy on statutory sick pay that survives contact with reality

A workable policy answers, in plain language, the questions people actually ask:

How much am I entitled to, and does that include bank holidays? State the number and state the bank holiday treatment in the same sentence.

How much notice do I need to give? Pick a rule proportionate to your operation. Statutory notice is twice the length of the leave requested, and many employers set something simpler and more generous.

Who approves it, and what happens if they are away? Name a deputy. An unstaffed approval queue is the most common reason requests sit for a week.

What happens when two people want the same week? This is the question most policies avoid, and avoiding it means the answer becomes "whoever asked first", which is fine until it collides with a school holiday.

What happens to unused days? State the carry-over limit and the deadline.

Keep it to a page. A policy nobody reads is a policy that does not exist.

Making the policy operational

A written policy and the system holding the balances have to agree, or the policy loses. In practice the system wins every disagreement, because it is what people look at.

That means the carry-over cap should be enforced by the tool, not by a reminder email in November. The bank holiday treatment should be reflected in the allowance the employee sees, not explained in a footnote. Approval routing should have a named deputy configured, not an informal understanding.

The test is simple: pick your three most awkward policy clauses and check whether someone could violate them without the system objecting. Every clause that fails that test is a clause that will be violated.

Where LeaveKit fits

LeaveKit is a leave management tool for UK teams of roughly 5 to 50 employees, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not do.

What it does: month, week, 30-day and day views with department filter, hover detail cards, holiday and birthday markers; date range with half-day start/end and live working-day calculation; and — the part that motivated it — warns at booking time when teammates are already off on the same dates (/api/leave/conflicts). It also handles overtime entry logging at /toil, converts logged hours into toil balance, CSV reporting, an iCal subscription feed, and public holiday calendars for 11 countries with the UK dates checked against gov.uk for 2026 to 2028.

What it does not do, stated plainly because buying decisions are made on the gaps: there is no Slack integration, no two-way Google or Outlook calendar sync (the iCal feed is one-way), no payroll or Xero connector, no public API, and no SSO. The mobile app is built but not yet released. If any of those are requirements today, LeaveKit is not the right tool for you yet.

Commercially, LeaveKit is in early access with a 30-day free trial and no card required. Public pricing is not published yet. You can also open the demo workspace without signing up at all, which is the fastest way to judge whether the wall chart matches how your team actually thinks about coverage.

Frequently asked questions

What records should an employer keep about leave?

At minimum: the request, the date it was made, who decided it, the decision, and the reason where a request was refused. Working time records should be retained, and the practical standard most employers work to is that a balance should be reconstructible from its underlying bookings at any point. Email approvals fail this test within about a year, which is usually shorter than the gap before someone needs to look.

How much holiday are UK employees legally entitled to?

The statutory minimum is 5.6 weeks of paid holiday per leave year, according to gov.uk holiday entitlement guidance. For someone working five days a week that is 28 days, and employers are permitted to count the eight UK bank holidays within that total rather than in addition to it. Part-time employees get 5.6 weeks of their own working week: three days a week gives 16.8 days. The contract must state whether bank holidays are included.

Can an employer refuse a holiday request?

Yes, an employer can decline a specific request, subject to notice requirements. What an employer cannot do is operate in a way that prevents someone taking their statutory entitlement at all. In practice, a refusal is far easier to defend when it comes with a concrete reason — a stated minimum cover level for that team on those dates — than when it is attributed to unspecified operational requirements. Acas publishes guidance on handling refusals.

What happens to holiday that has not been taken by the end of the leave year?

That depends on your policy and on which part of the entitlement is involved. Of the 5.6 weeks, 1.6 weeks can generally be restricted more tightly, while the four-week portion carries stronger protections — particularly where someone was prevented from taking it through sickness or because they were never given a real opportunity. Set a carry-over cap in policy, and run a balance check in the third quarter rather than in December.

Is LeaveKit free?

LeaveKit is in early access with a 30-day free trial and no card required. There is no permanent free tier and public pricing has not been announced yet. The trial is the full product: wall chart, booking with half-days, conflict warnings, approvals, TOIL logging, CSV reports and public holiday calendars. There is also a demo workspace at /demo that needs no sign-up at all.

Try it on a real month

The fastest way to judge any leave tool is to run one real month through it. LeaveKit has a demo workspace that needs no sign-up, and a 30-day trial with no card required.

Open the demo workspace · Start a 30-day trial