Long-term sickness absence: your pay, your job, and what happens when SSP ends

A few days off sick is a payroll question. A few months off sick is a legal one. Once an absence stretches into long-term territory, several things happen at once: your sick pay changes, your holiday quietly keeps building up, and at some point your employer starts thinking about whether the job can stay open. Knowing the order these things happen in puts you in a much stronger position.

The first 28 weeks

For the first 28 weeks of absence you receive statutory sick pay: the lower of 80% of your average weekly earnings or £123.25 a week, payable from day one under the rules that came in on 6 April 2026.

Before you plan around SSP, check your contract. Many employers pay occupational sick pay, commonly full pay for a period then half pay, and contractual terms beat the statutory minimum. Your employer must pay whichever scheme your contract provides.

Throughout this period:

• You are still employed, with continuity of service intact.
• Holiday keeps accruing. Statutory annual leave builds up while you are off sick, at the full 5.6 weeks a year.
• Your other rights continue: pension contributions if your scheme provides them, maternity rights if relevant, and protection from detriment.

Your holiday does not disappear

This is the point most people miss. If you are off sick for a long time you keep accruing annual leave, and if you cannot take it because you are ill, you can carry over the four weeks of EU-derived statutory leave for up to 18 months. If you leave the job, accrued but untaken holiday must be paid in lieu. On a long absence that can be a meaningful sum, and it is frequently forgotten in final pay calculations.

When SSP runs out

Your employer must give you form SSP1 before your SSP ends, so you can claim other support. The main routes:

• New-style Employment and Support Allowance, if you have enough National Insurance contributions.
• Universal Credit, which is means-tested and can run alongside or instead.
• Occupational health or income protection insurance, if your employer provides it. Check, because people often have cover they do not know about.

None of this requires you to resign. Do not resign because SSP has ended. Resignation can affect benefit claims and destroys your employment rights at a stroke.

Keeping in touch and returning to work

Reasonable contact during a long absence is normal and expected: welfare meetings, updates on your likely return date, occupational health referrals. What your employer should not do is pressure you back before you are fit.

A fit note can say you "may be fit for work" with adjustments: phased hours, amended duties, workplace changes. Your employer should discuss and consider those adjustments. If your condition amounts to a disability under the Equality Act 2010, reasonable adjustments are not a courtesy, they are a legal duty, and our guide to disability discrimination explains how far that duty goes.

The capability question

At some point in a long absence an employer may start a capability process, which can lawfully end in dismissal if handled fairly. Fair means consultation with you, up-to-date medical evidence, genuine consideration of adjustments, and a realistic view of when you might return. It is not fair to rush, to skip the medical evidence, or to treat the process as a formality with the decision already made. If matters are heading towards a dispute, ACAS early conciliation is the required first step before any tribunal claim.

That process, and how to defend yourself in it, is covered in our guide to being dismissed while on sick leave. The short version: a long absence makes dismissal possible, not automatic.

Long-term sickness is hard enough without money worries and job fear on top. If your employer is mismanaging the process, or you suspect the capability conversation is coming, take advice early. The position is almost always stronger before the decision letter than after it.