Our Commercial Director Brandon Collins on the impact of day-one SSP, and why the better response isn't a tighter absence policy, it's early intervention.
On 6 April 2026 the rules on Statutory Sick Pay changed under the Employment Rights Act 2025. SSP is now payable from the first day of sickness absence rather than the fourth. The three waiting days have gone. The lower earnings limit has gone with them, so lower-paid workers who used to fall below the threshold now qualify too.
For any employer already paying company sick pay from day one, the day-to-day impact is small. For everyone leaning on SSP alone, the maths has moved. Every short absence now carries a cost from the first morning and removing the waiting days is widely expected to nudge short-term absence upwards.
The common response will be to tighten the absence policy, lower the trigger points and keep a closer eye on the patterns. There is a place for all of that. The trouble is that managing absence after it happens does nothing about why it happened in the first place. The absences that cost the most are the ones that could have been shorter, or avoided.
So the more useful question for any HR or finance lead this year is this:
Two things move that figure more than any policy tweak.
The first is fast access to a GP. When an employee can speak to a clinician the same day instead of waiting two or three weeks, a minor problem gets treated before it turns into a fortnight off work.
The second is mental health support people will actually use. Stress, anxiety and burnout are now among the largest drivers of long-term absence, and they almost never show up as one clean sick day. They build over weeks. Reach someone early and the outcome changes. Leave it and a manageable problem becomes a long and expensive one.
This is the real case for an employee assistance programme and a virtual GP service working behind your sick pay policy. Day-one SSP raises the cost of doing nothing. Early intervention is how you bring that cost back down and it happens to be the kinder option as well as the cheaper one.
At HealthHero, this is the pattern we see across the organisations we work with. The clients who put fast clinical access in front of their people see noticeable falls in sick days and increases in workplace satisfaction. We deliver over four million consultations a year for more than 35 million people, and our employee assistance programme carries more than 25 years of clinical experience behind it.
Day-one sick pay has changed the economics of getting this right. The businesses that treat it as a reason to make healthcare quicker to reach, and support easier to use, will spend less and lose fewer days than the ones that simply rewrite their absence policy.