A driver phones in sick on a Monday; by the second week the question lands on the payroll desk: what are they owed, and for how long? Statutory Sick Pay is the legal floor beneath the answer - and like most statutory floors, it is lower and more mechanical than either party expects.
An employee too ill to work can get up to £123.25 per week in Statutory Sick Pay, paid by the employer, for up to 28 weeks. Three implications follow immediately. It is a weekly flat rate, not a percentage of earnings - the trunking driver on £700 a week and the part-time van driver both see the same £123.25. It is a ceiling on the statutory duty but a floor on what can be paid: the employee cannot get less than the statutory amount. And 28 weeks is the outer limit of the employer’s obligation to pay it.
An employee can get more if the company has its own sick pay scheme - an occupational scheme - and the place to look is the employment contract. This is where fleet reality diverges: some operators pay full or half pay for a defined period, others pay SSP only. Whichever the policy, the statutory amount is the minimum underneath it. What an employer cannot do is contract below the floor; what many drivers discover only when ill is that there is nothing above it.
The employee-facing summary hides a machinery employers need to know: SSP is administered by the employer through payroll - eligibility, qualifying days, waiting days and record-keeping all sit with the business, and there is a separate, fuller guide for employers carrying exactly that detail. The practical duties: establish whether the absence qualifies, pay at the right time in the pay cycle, keep the records, and stop correctly - at 28 weeks or when entitlement otherwise ends. Different rules apply to agricultural workers, a niche that occasionally touches rural haulage.
Driving work gives SSP conversations edges other industries do not have. The driver unfit to drive is unfit for their whole job - there is no light-duties version of a trunk run - so absences run long and binary. The eyesight and medical standards that govern vocational licences mean some returns to work are gated by DVLA fitness, not just by feeling better. And the agency question recurs: agency workers’ SSP position follows the employment relationship they actually have, which for long-term agency drivers means the agency, not the hirer, is usually the employer in the frame.
Most SSP resentment comes from surprise: the employee who learns the rate on their first sick payslip feels misled, even when the employer has done everything lawfully. Fleets that handle this well put the number in the open early - in the contract, in the handbook, in the answer when a new starter asks “what happens if I’m ill?” £123.25 a week is a fact employees can plan around only if they know it before they need it. The same conversation should cover what the occupational scheme adds, if anything, and how absence is notified - because the first sick day is the wrong time to learn the reporting line too.
Because SSP is flat and capped, the real cost of driver sickness lands elsewhere: the covered shift, the agency premium, the rescheduled delivery. Fleets that manage absence well treat SSP as the payroll baseline and invest attention in what surrounds it - keeping in touch during absence, planning the return, handling the fit note and any medical restrictions on driving duties. The statutory scheme answers “what must we pay”; it says nothing about “how do we get a safe driver back”, which is the question that actually matters.
Evidence rules are simple but often fumbled. For 7 days or less a driver can self-certify, and you cannot demand a doctor’s note for that period. Once sickness runs beyond 7 days - weekends and bank holidays included - the employee owes you a fit note from a healthcare professional. You choose how to keep records of sickness absence, but keep something: HMRC can ask to see them if there is ever a dispute over SSP payment.