Self-Certification Sickness Form UK | SC2-Style Template (Word, PDF)

A self-certification sickness form is the employee's own written statement that they were too ill to work, used for absences of seven calendar days or fewer. The seven days run continuously and include weekends, bank holidays, and rest days, regardless of the person's normal working pattern, so a Monday-to-Sunday illness is fully self-certified even though only five of those days were working days. It is the recognised substitute for medical evidence during that first week, because UK law does not entitle an employer to demand a fit note (formally a Statement of Fitness for Work, the old Med3) until the absence has run beyond the seventh consecutive day.

People often confuse this document with a fit note, and the distinction matters for pay. A fit note is medical evidence signed by a clinician; a self-certification form is the employee's own declaration with no doctor involved. The best-known template is HMRC's SC2, which can be used both to ask the employer for SSP and to self-certify the absence, but you are not obliged to use the SC2 itself. Many businesses run their own return-to-work and sickness records instead, and that is entirely lawful provided the form captures the same core information. What you must not do is treat the form as proof of SSP entitlement on its own, because eligibility turns on separate statutory tests rather than on the declaration.

Short-term sickness administration rests on three pillars: the Employment Rights Act 1996, the Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992 together with the SSP regulations made under it, and the Equality Act 2010 where ill health shades into disability. The seven-day self-certification rule itself comes from the SSP evidence requirements: an employer cannot insist on a fit note for an absence of seven calendar days or fewer, and during that window the employee's own statement is the accepted evidence. HMRC's SC2 form exists precisely for this purpose, and official guidance confirms it can be used to claim SSP or to self-certify. For employers reviewing their obligations, the government's own employer guidance on Statutory Sick Pay changes sets out the current position in plain terms.

The most important recent change comes from the Employment Rights Act 2025, brought into force by commencement regulations on 6 April 2026. Two long-standing barriers were removed. SSP is now payable from the first full day of sickness absence, so the old three waiting days are gone, and the Lower Earnings Limit qualifying threshold has been abolished, meaning eligibility no longer depends on earning a minimum weekly amount. The rate is now the lower of the statutory flat rate or 80% of the employee's average weekly earnings, so higher earners receive the flat rate and lower-paid staff receive a proportionate figure rather than nothing at all. Transitional protection applies to some employees who were already on SSP before that date, and a long absence that began before 22 September 2025 does not suddenly become payable. None of this changed the documentation rule: self-certification still covers the first seven days, and the fit note threshold is unchanged. Where repeated or lengthy sickness may be linked to a disability, the Equality Act 2010 imposes a duty to consider reasonable adjustments, and a rigid absence-trigger policy applied without that consideration is a well-trodden route into a discrimination claim.

The everyday trigger is a routine short illness, the kind that lasts two or three days and never reaches a doctor. The employee phones in, recovers, returns, and on the first day back completes the form to confirm the dates. Without that signed confirmation you are relying on a voicemail and a memory, which is exactly the "agreed in the corridor" scenario that unravels when payroll queries the SSP entry. The form turns an informal call into a record you can stand behind.

A second common case is the absence that creeps towards the seven-day limit. Someone is off Thursday and Friday, stays unwell over the weekend, and is still poorly on Monday and Tuesday. You need the self-certification form to cover the whole stretch, and you need to know that day eight is the point at which you may lawfully ask for a fit note, not before. Getting that boundary right protects both the SSP calculation and the working relationship.

The form also earns its place when sickness sits alongside other absence types you already manage through your leave request and approval templates, because consistent paperwork across holiday, unpaid leave, and sickness is what demonstrates fair treatment if a pattern is ever challenged. Two edge cases reward attention. First, an employee who falls sick during booked annual leave can usually convert those days to sick leave and reclaim the holiday, but only with contemporaneous evidence, and the self-certification form is that evidence. Second, where an absence may be pregnancy-related or disability-related, the form should record only what you genuinely need, because over-collecting medical detail creates its own risk.

• The employee and employer identification block captures the full name, job title, department, and payroll or employee reference, so the completed form maps cleanly onto your payroll system. A statement that cannot be tied to a named individual and a pay record is of little use when SSP is questioned weeks later.
• The absence dates and calendar-day count record the first and last day of incapacity and total the calendar days, including any weekend or rest days that fall inside the period. This is the field that proves the absence stayed within the seven-day self-certification window rather than crossing into fit-note territory.
• The reason for absence is captured in proportionate terms, prompting a brief description without inviting intrusive medical disclosure. The template deliberately keeps this light, because the Equality Act 2010 and data-minimisation principles both point away from collecting more health information than the situation requires.
• The signed declaration of truth is the heart of the document. The employee confirms the statement is accurate and understands that a false declaration may affect pay and amount to misconduct, which is what gives the form its evidential weight in any later dispute.
• The SSP and notification section records whether the absence was reported in line with your reporting procedure and flags the SSP position, sitting naturally beside your employment contract and written particulars where the sickness reporting rules are set out.
• The return-to-work confirmation notes the actual return date and any short discussion held, closing the loop and feeding directly into your wider absence and dismissal records should attendance ever become a formal matter.

Statutory Sick Pay and the seven-day self-certification rule operate uniformly across England, Wales, and Scotland, because SSP is reserved social-security legislation rather than a devolved matter. The reforms that took effect on 6 April 2026 apply identically in all three nations, so a self-certification form drafted for a business in Cardiff works without amendment for one in Edinburgh or Manchester. The practical differences you will meet are contractual rather than territorial: many employers operate an occupational or company sick pay scheme that pays more than SSP, and where that exists the self-certification form still governs the evidence even though the money flows under the contract.

Northern Ireland runs a parallel but separate regime. The substantive rules mirror Great Britain, including the move to day-one payment, but they sit under Northern Ireland social-security legislation administered separately, so an employer with staff there should confirm the position under the local framework rather than assume the Great Britain wording is interchangeable. The seven-day self-certification principle itself is consistent.

Beyond geography, the variation that genuinely affects how you use the form is sector and contract type. Agency workers and other staff paid through PAYE now fall within SSP since the Lower Earnings Limit was removed, so the form is relevant to a far wider workforce than before. Employers running absence-trigger or Bradford Factor systems should treat self-certified short absences carefully, because clustering them mechanically without considering whether any are disability-related is precisely where the Equality Act 2010 duty bites. The document is the same everywhere; the policy you wrap around it is what needs local and contractual judgement.

You begin with the identification block, entering the employee's name, role, and payroll reference so the completed form matches the right pay record from the outset. From there the form moves to the absence itself, where you set the first and last day of incapacity and let the calendar-day total populate, which immediately shows whether the absence stayed inside the seven-day self-certification limit or has tipped into fit-note territory. Next comes the proportionate reason field, kept deliberately brief, followed by the notification details that confirm the absence was reported in line with your own procedure. The employee then completes the signed declaration, which is the part that gives the document its weight, before the manager adds the return-to-work date and any short note from the back-to-work conversation. The finished form is saved to the personnel file and, where SSP applies, passed to payroll so the entry is supported by evidence rather than recollection. If you also need to record the original request or approval of related time off, the form pairs naturally with your other leave request documents so the whole absence sits in one consistent set.

The most frequent error is demanding a fit note for a two or three-day illness. Employers do this out of caution, but during the first seven calendar days the law treats self-certification as sufficient, and insisting on early medical evidence is not only unenforceable for SSP purposes, it can leave you covering a private clinician's fee. The mirror-image mistake is failing to collect any written confirmation at all, so the absence rests on a phone call no one wrote down; this is what produces the payroll query that nobody can answer three weeks on. A third recurring problem is miscounting the seven days by excluding weekends, which wrongly pushes the perceived fit-note date earlier and creates needless friction with an employee who was entitled to self-certify the whole period.

Two further mistakes carry real legal exposure. Treating the form as proof of SSP entitlement is wrong, because entitlement now depends on the Employment Rights Act 2025 eligibility tests rather than on the declaration, and promising SSP that does not in fact qualify creates a pay dispute of your own making. The most serious error is applying an absence-trigger policy rigidly to someone whose sickness may be disability-related, ignoring the reasonable-adjustment duty under the Equality Act 2010. A mechanical "three absences and you are out" approach is one of the clearest routes into a discrimination or unfair dismissal claim, and a stack of correctly completed self-certification forms will not save a process that skipped that consideration.