Statutory Sick Pay: linking period (weeks)

How close together two spells of sickness must be to count as one for Statutory Sick Pay.

8weeks

Corroborated Act of Parliament Great Britain in force since 1992-07-01

Checked against its sources: statute verified 2026-09-21·guidance verified 2026-09-21

Scope: s.152(4) lets regulations substitute a LARGER number of weeks; none has. From 6 April 2026 s.152(1) (the three-day minimum period) is omitted and s.152(2) is reworded by the Employment Rights Act 2025, but subsection (3) is untouched — the probe judges the subsection, not the section. The value has stood since the Act's consolidation of the 1982 SSP scheme.

Current sources

Source A · LegislationSocial Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992, c. 4 s. 152(3) ("Any two periods of incapacity for work which are separated by a period of not more than 8 weeks shall be treated as a single period of incapacity for work")

retrieved 2026-09-08

Source B · Official guidancehttps://www.gov.uk/statutory-sick-pay ("Linked periods of sickness … To be linked, the periods must: last more than one full working day; be 8 weeks or less apart")

retrieved 2026-07-29

History

Value	From	To	Status	Sources
8	1992-07-01	—	Corroborated	Legislation: Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992, c. 4 s. 152(3) ("Any two periods of incapacity for work which are separated by a period of not more than 8 weeks shall be treated as a single period of incapacity for work") retrieved 2026-09-08 Official guidance: https://www.gov.uk/statutory-sick-pay ("Linked periods of sickness … To be linked, the periods must: last more than one full working day; be 8 weeks or less apart") retrieved 2026-07-29

Receipt

Everything above is reproducible and independently checkable — no trust in this site required (how verification works).

Figure ID: employment.ssp.piw_linking_weeks
Name in the API: Statutory Sick Pay: linking period
Record fields (source type · unit · jurisdiction · status): act·weeks·GB·corroborated
Record hash (canonical JSON, SHA-256): sha256:d1c82b222ac88564ed6767c26c0fb7bb597064e98af23d308064c7293d27c18f
Source snapshots (SHA-256): Legislation: sha256:0f940597610b91f915d7c5048098e55565a296099cde77a7507d89aed476a43a; Official guidance: sha256:17da7584134786c6b306464e8c4570d36347abaf2f72a1aca3afb4e444568f64
Listed in the signed manifest: release 3.0.0 manifest · record_hashes["employment.ssp.piw_linking_weeks"]
Machine-readable record: /v1/figures/employment.ssp.piw_linking_weeks · current only: /v1/figures/employment.ssp.piw_linking_weeks/current

Compiler's notes

A count, located by an authored LOCATORS phrase read from s.152(3); the GOV.UK list item is registered in B_EVIDENCE for the nightly. effective_from is the Act's own commencement, read from s.177(4) in the archived whole-Act current view: "Except as provided in Schedule 4 to the Consequential Provisions Act, this Act shall come into force on 1st July 1992": the rule is the consolidated text, not a later amendment. (The subsection was cited as s.177(2) when this row was authored on 2026-09-08; the commencement is s.177(4), corrected here against the archived whole-Act view.)