UK Bereavement Leave Request Template (Word & PDF)

A compassionate leave request and a bereavement leave request are close cousins, and UK workplaces often use the terms loosely, but they are not identical. Bereavement leave is time off following a death. Compassionate leave is the wider umbrella, covering a death but also a critically ill relative, a family emergency, or the aftermath of a loss that needs practical attention. The request document sits underneath both: it is the employee's written ask, addressed to a line manager or HR, naming the person affected, the relationship, the dates sought, and whether the employee expects the time to be paid.

What makes the UK version distinctive is that the request must flag its legal basis, because the answer changes the employer's obligations entirely. If the deceased was a dependant, the Employment Rights Act 1996 gives a right to reasonable unpaid time off. If the employee is a bereaved parent, Statutory Parental Bereavement Leave applies and the days are protected from day one. Everything else is governed by the contract or by the employer's goodwill. A well-drafted request prompts for exactly the information needed to place the absence in the right box, without demanding intrusive detail the employer has no business asking for. That balance, dignity for the employee and a clean record for the business, is what separates a professional template from a scribbled note approved in passing.

The starting point for any bereavement absence in the UK is section 57A of the Employment Rights Act 1996, which gives employees the right to a reasonable amount of unpaid time off to take necessary action when a dependant dies. A dependant is a spouse, civil partner, child, parent, or someone who relied on the employee for care. The statute deliberately refuses to define how many days "reasonable" means, which is why a written policy and a clear request form matter so much: they convert an elastic legal standard into something both sides can plan around. The Working Time Regulations 1998 sit alongside this where an employee chooses to take the time as annual leave instead.

The one place the law is firm is parental loss. Under the Parental Bereavement (Leave and Pay) Act 2018, widely known as Jack's Law, an employed parent who loses a child under 18, or suffers a stillbirth after 24 weeks of pregnancy, has a day-one right to two weeks of leave, with statutory pay available to those who meet the 26-week continuous service test. This is the only general bereavement entitlement that is both protected and, for eligible parents, paid; outside it, there is no statutory right to be paid for bereavement at all. From 29 December 2025, the Paternity Leave (Bereavement) Act 2024 also strengthened protection where the mother dies, removing the usual service qualification for the surviving partner. For the current rules on what counts as reasonable and how funerals are treated, the Acas guidance on time off for bereavement is the authoritative reference and worth reading before drafting any policy.

Two further duties shape how requests should be handled. Absences connected to a disability, or to grief that triggers a recognised mental health condition, can engage the Equality Act 2010, so a rigid approach to repeated absence carries discrimination risk. And the Employment Rights Bill currently before Parliament proposes a wider statutory right to bereavement leave, including for pregnancy loss before 24 weeks, so employers drafting policies now should leave room to expand them. The practical lesson runs through all of it: capture the basis of the leave in writing, apply it consistently, and you stay on the right side of every one of these regimes. For employers tightening up their wider absence paperwork, our UK leave request templates for annual, sick and parental leave cover the rest of the picture.

The most obvious trigger is the death of an employee's immediate family member, where the person needs a few days to grieve, arrange a funeral, and deal with the estate. Here the request should record the relationship and the dates, and the employer's response should state plainly whether the days are paid under the contract or taken as discretionary compassionate leave. The second common scenario is a critically ill relative, where the time off is anticipatory rather than reactive: an employee whose parent is in end-of-life care may need intermittent days, and a written request lets both sides plan around a difficult and unpredictable period.

A third situation is the time off for dependants emergency under section 57A, which often arrives with no warning at all, a sudden death requiring the employee to leave mid-shift. The request may be completed after the fact in these cases, formalising an absence that was authorised verbally in the moment. Bereaved parents form a distinct category: a parent invoking Jack's Law is exercising a statutory right, not asking a favour, and the document should record it as such so payroll applies statutory parental bereavement pay correctly.

Two edge cases regularly catch employers out. The first is the death of someone who is not a legal dependant, a grandparent who raised the employee, a long-term partner not formally a civil partner, a close friend treated as family. There is no statutory right here, but refusing all flexibility is a fast route to resentment and reputational damage; the request gives the employer a structured way to exercise discretion fairly. The second is a request that overlaps with an existing entitlement, such as an employee on maternity leave who suffers a bereavement, where you need to be careful not to disturb a protected leave period. Where an absence may stretch into longer-term sickness, pairing this document with our UK leave request category for sickness and unpaid absence keeps the paper trail consistent.

• The statement of the basis for leave is the clause that does the heavy lifting. It asks the employee, and then confirms with the employer, whether the time off is statutory (Jack's Law), contractual (a defined compassionate leave entitlement in the handbook), or purely discretionary. This single field determines pay treatment, length, and the employee's protection, so it sits at the top of the form rather than buried in the detail.
• The relationship and circumstances field captures who has died or fallen ill and the employee's relationship to them, in proportionate terms. It is drafted to gather only what the employer reasonably needs to assess the request, never sensitive medical or family detail beyond that, which keeps the document compliant with data-minimisation expectations and respectful at a painful moment.
• The dates and duration block records the first and last day of absence and any phased or intermittent pattern, so payroll, the rota, and any handover can be planned precisely. This is the clause that defeats the "agreed in the corridor" dispute, because the approved dates are confirmed in writing and signed off.
• The pay treatment confirmation states explicitly whether the days are paid in full, paid at a statutory rate, taken as annual leave, or unpaid. Leaving this implied is the single most common cause of post-absence payroll arguments, so the template forces a decision.
• The handover and cover note lets the employee flag urgent matters and the manager record who will cover them, turning a sensitive absence into a managed one without adding pressure on the grieving employee.

Employment law in this area is largely uniform across England, Wales, and Scotland, since the Employment Rights Act 1996, the Parental Bereavement (Leave and Pay) Act 2018, and the Equality Act 2010 all apply on a Great Britain basis. The right to reasonable time off for dependants, Jack's Law, and the absence of any general right to paid bereavement leave are the same whether the employer is in Cardiff, Edinburgh, or Manchester. Scotland's separate body of law touches family and succession matters, but the leave entitlements themselves are not devolved, so a single GB-wide template serves all three jurisdictions without modification.

Northern Ireland is the genuine exception and the point employers most often miss. Employment law there is devolved, and the governing statute is the Employment Rights (Northern Ireland) Order 1996 rather than the 1996 Act, with bereavement provisions delivered through the Parental Bereavement (Leave and Pay) Act (Northern Ireland) 2022. The substance closely mirrors the GB position, including the two-week parental entitlement, but the statutory references differ and the relevant guidance comes from the Labour Relations Agency rather than Acas. An employer operating in Belfast should confirm the citations in any written policy point to the Northern Ireland legislation. Using a GB-drafted document referencing Acas and the 1996 Act in a Northern Ireland workplace will not invalidate the leave, but it undermines the professionalism of the record if a dispute ever reaches a tribunal. Where a business operates across both, our UK employment contract and policy templates help align the wider paperwork so the leave request fits a coherent set of documents.

You start by identifying yourself and your role, then naming the person who has died or is critically ill and your relationship to them, keeping the detail proportionate to what your employer reasonably needs. From there the form asks you to set out the dates you are requesting and whether you expect the absence to run as a continuous block or as separate days, which matters where a funeral and the estate sit weeks apart. The next step is the part most people skip and later regret: stating what basis you believe the leave falls under, whether you are a bereaved parent invoking your statutory right, relying on a compassionate leave clause in your contract, or simply asking your employer to exercise discretion.

The employer's side of the document then confirms the decision, records the agreed dates, and sets out the pay treatment in plain terms, so there is no ambiguity when payroll runs. If evidence is appropriate, such as confirmation of the funeral date for a parental bereavement claim, the form prompts for it without demanding anything intrusive. You finish by both parties dating and signing, which fixes the agreement and gives each side a copy. For a request you can complete and confirm in minutes, our UK leave request forms drafted for employers and staff walk you through each field in order.

The error that causes the most trouble is failing to state the basis of the leave. A manager who approves "a few days off" without recording whether they are paid, statutory, or discretionary creates exactly the dispute the document is meant to prevent, because payroll, the employee, and any future tribunal all reconstruct the agreement differently. Closely related is treating every bereavement the same: applying a rigid "three days for any death" rule ignores that a parent losing a child has a statutory two-week right under Jack's Law, and that flattening it into a short contractual allowance can amount to denying a legal entitlement. Employers also routinely confuse compassionate leave with sick leave, paying Statutory Sick Pay for a bereavement that does not qualify, or vice versa, which creates payroll corrections and an unhappy employee.

A second cluster of mistakes turns on overreach and inconsistency. Asking a grieving employee for a death certificate or intrusive family detail, when none is needed, is both insensitive and a data-protection risk, so the request should gather only what the decision requires. Inconsistency is just as dangerous: approving one employee's compassionate leave generously and refusing another's on similar facts invites a discrimination or unfair-treatment claim, particularly where the difference correlates with a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010. Finally, many employers still rely on a verbal agreement and assume goodwill will hold, only to find months later that nobody can say what was promised. Capturing the decision in writing, with our UK dismissal and HR letter templates available for the harder conversations that sometimes follow long absences, keeps the whole record defensible.