NHS sick pay

This is an estimate from a published scale, not a statement of entitlement. Your reckonable service and the aggregation of past absence are your employer’s to determine, and your trust’s own sickness absence policy sits on top of Section 14 rather than replacing it.

The scale

Paragraph 14.2 sets sick pay by length of service. This table is identical in all three printings of Section 14 — England, Wales, and Scotland with Northern Ireland — so it is the one part of this subject that genuinely is UK-wide.

Why the same months are worth different money in each nation

This is the part a single UK-wide table gets wrong. The handbook prints Section 14 three times, and paragraph 14.4 — the definition of full pay — is different in each. It decides whether your unsocial hours count while you are off, which for anyone on nights or weekends is a large part of their pay.

England is the outlier and the one most likely to disappoint. Its 14.4 gives the wider “as if you had been at work” definition only to staff who were on Handbook terms at 30 June 2018 earning £18,160 or less, and to injury-related absence. Everyone else — including every new starter since 1 July 2018 — falls under 14.5: the pay point, plus any high cost area supplement and locally agreed protection, and nothing for nights or weekends.

Wales withholds regularly paid supplements for the first week only, then pays as if you had been at work. Scotland and Northern Ireland share one printing of the section, and it is the most generous of the three: supplements are included for everyone from the first day.

When does NHS sick pay reset?

It does not reset on a date. Paragraph 14.6 works the other way round: on the first day of an absence, your employer takes the entitlement for your service and deducts the aggregate of paid sickness absence in the twelve months immediately preceding that day. The window moves with you, so entitlement returns gradually as older absence falls out of the back of it rather than all at once in April.

That is why the calculator above asks what you have already had. Six years’ service does not mean six months of full pay available today; it means six months less whatever the last twelve months have used. Some absences are disregarded in that aggregation — injury at work, and absence covered by injury allowance among them — and whether yours qualifies is your employer’s determination, not an arithmetic one.

Half pay is not half your pay

Full pay has to be inclusive of statutory benefits, and statutory sick pay added to half pay cannot exceed full pay. In practice that means half pay plus SSP, not half pay alone — so the drop is real but usually smaller than the word “half” suggests. Your payslip will show the two lines separately.

What this does not cover

• Whether a particular absence is disregarded under 14.6 — that is a determination, not a calculation.
• Injury allowance under Section 22, which is a separate scheme with its own conditions.
• Ill-health retirement, which is a pension decision and deliberately out of scope on this site.
• Bank and agency staff, whose sick leave arrangements are not Section 14’s.
• Anything about whether you should be at work. This is arithmetic on a published scale.