You now pay sick pay from the first day off. Here is what that does to a cafe.

Quick version, because you are on the floor: from 6 April 2026 you pay Statutory Sick Pay from the first day someone is off sick, not from day four, and you pay it to staff you never used to (your very part-time people). Nobody handed you extra revenue to cover it, so it comes straight out of margin. Here is the real cost on a normal cafe rota, one rule that makes it bite cafes harder than most, and the bit that quietly shows up when you sell.

What it does to your profit, first

Sick pay used to be nearly free for a cafe. Most bugs cleared in two or three days, and the first three days of any absence were unpaid "waiting days", so you often paid nothing at all. That is over.

Since 6 April 2026, Statutory Sick Pay (SSP, the legal minimum you must pay a sick employee) starts on day one. And the Lower Earnings Limit is gone. That was the pay floor (£125 a week in 2025 to 2026) you had to clear before SSP applied, so your short-shift staff got nothing. Now they qualify too.

Two changes, one new bill. It lands entirely on your wage line, and your wage line is already the biggest number in the business. If you have not looked at it since spring, you have been absorbing it out of your own take-home.

The rate, in plain numbers

SSP is now the lower of two figures: 80% of that person's average weekly earnings, or the flat rate of £123.25 a week (up from £118.75 the year before). Whichever is smaller is what you pay.

So for most of your team you pay the flat £123.25 a week while they are off. Spread across a normal five-day week that is about £24.65 for each working day. For your lowest-paid, very part-time staff, the 80% rule caps it lower: someone averaging £100 a week now gets £80 a week of SSP where before they got nothing.

A normal week, costed

Take one employee off with a stomach bug, Monday to Friday.

• Before April: days one to three were unpaid waiting days, so you paid two days, roughly £49.
• Now: all five days are paid from day one, roughly £123.

That single week of illness costs you about £74 more than it did in March, per person, every time it happens. In a busy kitchen it happens a lot. Run it across your own team over a year: four or five bouts of the usual winter bugs, plus the part-timers who now qualify at all, and you are looking at a few hundred pounds of new cost that used to be zero. The government's own estimate is around £450 million a year in extra employer cost nationally, with about 1.3 million lower-paid workers newly covered.

Why this rule hits cafes harder than a shop or an office

Here is the part most SSP explainers miss. If you handle food, you are not allowed to just push through a bug.

Food Standards Agency rules say anyone with diarrhoea or vomiting must stay away from food work until they have been symptom-free for 48 hours. That is not a judgement call, it is a condition of running a food business. So the exact absences a cafe is legally forced to enforce, the short gut bugs that used to fall inside the free waiting days, are now paid from the first day for everyone on the rota.

You cannot manage this cost by leaning on someone to come in early. The law says they stay home, and now the law says you pay them from day one. So for a cafe this is not a soft HR change you can absorb with goodwill. It is a hard cost attached to a rule you already have to follow.

The quieter effect on what your cafe is worth

Think past this year for a second. A buyer values a cafe on the profit a new owner would actually keep, its owner earnings, times a multiple. A permanent rise in the cost of every sick day lowers that profit unless you have repriced or tightened the rota to offset it.

So an owner who shrugs and eats it does two things at once: gives up profit now, and quietly marks down the sale price later, because the buyer prices off the lower, post-change margin. An owner who treats it as a nudge to reprice and to run the rota to real demand keeps the margin intact and hands the buyer a cleaner number. Same event, two very different outcomes two years out.