What is Occupational Sick Pay?
Although optional for employers, having occupational sick pay (OSP) in place means that you are still giving qualified employees full pay even if they are absent from work due to sickness as opposed to paying the mandatory statutory sick pay.
There are two variables to consider when setting up occupational sick pay for your workplace:
Qualifying period - the amount of time an employee has to have been working in the company before becoming eligible for occupational sick pay.
The number of paid sick leave days per year - the number of sick leave days in which qualified employees are paid the same rate as a working day.
As OSP is an optional benefit, there's no legislation or duty to provide a specific minimum qualifying period or maximum number of paid sick leave days per year.
Feature Overview
✅ You can set up your OSP scheme at a company level and this will automatically apply to any employee who is away on sickness leave and eligible for your occupational scheme.
✅ OSP is displayed separately from statutory sick pay on the employee's payslip so they can see the breakdown of earnings.
✅ Admins can enable a qualifying period so that OSP only applies to employees who have been working at the company for a certain length of time.
❌ Occupational Sick Pay currently resets every year based on your annual leave year. If you manage Occupational Sick Pay on a rolling basis, please refer to our Help Centre article.
❌ OSP can only be paid in full days via PayFit.
❌ You can only set up one OSP policy. If your scheme varies depending on multiple factors (such as an increased entitlement with each year's length of service), you'll need to adjust this in the employee's record.
❌ Any updates to your OSP settings apply from the current month onwards. If you're adding sick leave for a previous month and want to backdate the employee's OSP entitlement, please raise a ticket via our Contact Us form and a member of our team can update this for you.
Enabling OSP for your company
From the left, choose Company Settings, then Payroll set-up.
Under the Leaves section, click Edit Occupational leaves.
Under the OSP section, choose Yes.
From the No qualifying period drop-down, select how long an employee must work for your company before they're eligible for OSP.
Enter the number of days OSP your employees are entitled to.
Click Save.
Adjust OSP entitlement for one employee
From the employee's record, click the Leaves tab.
Under the Sick Leave section, click Customise OSP policy.
Enter the employee's OSP entitlement in the paid sick leave days per leave year field.
Click Save.
Adjust OSP entitlement for multiple employees
From the left, choose Imports, then More imports.
Under the Leaves section, click Edit sick leave settings.
Click Download a template and open the downloaded file.
Update the template, and save the file.
Follow the on-screen instructions to upload your completed file.