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Casual (Zero Hours) Employees Absence Recording

Emma Ibarreta

When an employee has no particular hours on a contract or does irregular patterns as a lot of our casual employees do, what days do we record for an absence to be calculated correctly. From my research it seems to point to 7 days being ticked, but as this could impact this business financially and we need to confidently feed this down the chain, I would like this confirmed. Ticking 7 days for a 1 day absence, could water down the SSP to a smaller figure than recording 1 day for example when they could receive a full week. Could you provide guidance? Thank you

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Alison Barlow

Hi Emma,

Here's an article from CIPP about SSP and employees on 'zero hour' contracts.  It mentions the current SSP eligibility criteria, but will still apply post April 2026 in regards to how to establish qualifying days.

https://www.cipp.org.uk/resources/news/advisory-spotlight-ssp-for-zero-hours-contracts.html

QDs are the only days for which SSP can be paid, these must be agreed by both the employee and employer, and they are usually the days of the week on which an employee is ‘required to work’ or be available for work or normally work according to their contract of employment. Bank holidays do not interrupt the normal pattern of QDs and there must always be at least one QD each week. If the employer and employee cannot agree the QDs, legislation and regulations provide for the QDs to be one of the following: 

  • the days on which the employer and employee agree that the employee is/was required to work under the contract,  
  • or a Wednesday if there is/was no specified day of work,  
  • or every day of the week except those on which they agree that none of the workforce were required to work 

For example, if the employer was to decide that there was 7 QDs, because employee could potentially work Monday to Sunday as a casual or zero hour employee, then the employer you would divide the weekly SSP (currently £116.75) rate by 7 and pay the daily rate of £16.68 for each QD day the employee was sick, after the three waiting days had been served. 

I hope this helps,

Kind Regards

Ali

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