This summer has given us two separate reasons to expect a rise in sick pay claims. The UK is on course for its hottest summer on record, according to the Met Office, with drought across much of England and Wales and repeated amber heat warnings through August — and hot weather has a well-documented effect on workplace absence. Analysis of June’s heatwave alone put the cost to the UK economy at over £1 billion, with 24 million working hours lost and roughly 1 in 25 workers not working at all because of the heat. Layer that on top of day one statutory sick pay rights, introduced back in April, and the expectation going into this summer was straightforward: more heat, more entitlement to claim, more claims.

We haven’t seen it. Not from the SSP reform, and not from the heatwaves either.

Start with the regulatory side, because that’s the one we were watching most closely back in early 2026. The conversation across the umbrella sector had a familiar shape: another regulatory deadline, another round of “how much is this going to cost us?”

The change in question was day one statutory sick pay. From 6 April 2026, the three-day waiting period disappeared. Employees became entitled to SSP from their very first day of sickness, and the Lower Earnings Limit — which had previously excluded lower-paid and part-time workers from SSP altogether — was abolished. SSP is now paid at £123.25 a week, or 80% of average weekly earnings, whichever is lower.

For umbrella companies, that change lands differently than it does for a conventional employer. As the employer of record, umbrella companies carry the SSP liability directly for every contractor they place — regardless of assignment length or how many hours they’ve worked. Combine that with agencies now facing joint and several liability for PAYE failures in the supply chain, and it’s easy to see why the run-up to April was tense. We were talking about it internally. So was pretty much everyone else we spoke to in the sector.

What we braced for

The worry wasn’t abstract. Remove a three-day wait and a minimum earnings threshold in one go, and the reasonable assumption is that claims volume goes up — short-notice absences that previously wouldn’t have qualified for SSP at all now do, and there’s no waiting period to discourage a same-day claim. For a workforce that moves between assignments as often as contractors do, that’s not a small operational question. It’s payroll accuracy, it’s cash flow, it’s whether the systems built for the old rules can handle the new ones without errors creeping in.

Then summer arrived, and the second reason to expect a rise turned up alongside it. Heat is one of the more consistent drivers of short-notice absence — headaches, dizziness, disrupted sleep, and for anyone with an existing health condition, a genuinely higher risk of falling ill. With a record-breaking summer and day one entitlement now sitting side by side, June, July and August looked like exactly the months a claims spike would show up, if it was going to.

What we’ve actually seen

Several months on, we haven’t seen the spike we were bracing for from either direction. Our SSP claims volume since April has stayed broadly in line with where it sat before the change, heatwaves included. That’s not a dramatic finding, and we’re not going to dress it up as one — but it’s worth saying plainly, because “we were worried about X and X didn’t happen” is a less common thing to hear in this industry than “we told you this would be a problem.”

It’s a pattern several other umbrella companies we’ve spoken with have echoed too, at least anecdotally.

The honest caveat

We want to be upfront about the limits of what we’re saying here. This is our own claims data, over a few months, without the benefit of sector-wide statistics to compare it against. We haven’t seen a comprehensive industry data set on SSP claims volumes since the reform came into force, and until HMRC, CIPP or REC publish something more definitive, “no increase” is an observation, not a conclusion. Absence patterns can shift for all sorts of seasonal and economic reasons that have nothing to do with SSP rules, and a few months is a short window to draw firm conclusions from.

So consider this an early, honest check-in rather than a victory lap. If the data changes later in the year, we’ll say so.

Why it matters either way

Whether or not claims volumes move, the administrative bar has gone up. Every sickness absence now needs to be recorded and calculated correctly from day one, for every contractor, regardless of how short the assignment or how few hours they’ve worked. That’s exactly the kind of detail that gets missed when payroll processes aren’t built for scrutiny — and exactly why every payslip we issue is independently audited weekly under SafeRec certification. Getting SSP right isn’t just about avoiding a cost spike; it’s about the everyday accuracy contractors and agencies are trusting us to get right, claim by claim.

If you’re a contractor or an agency wanting to understand what day one SSP rights mean for you in practice, our team is happy to talk it through.