Unpaid Carer’s Leave

Unpaid carer’s leave has been part of UK employment law for two years now, but in our day-to-day work with clients we still see plenty of businesses that haven’t fully embedded it into their policies, payroll processes or line manager training. With a government review currently in progress, and possible reform coming in late 2026 or early 2027, now is a sensible moment to revisit how you handle carer’s leave requests.

A reminder of the entitlement

Under the Carer’s Leave Act, employees have had a day-one statutory right to take up to one week (five working days) of unpaid leave per rolling 12-month period to provide or arrange care for a dependant with a long-term care need. The entitlement applies regardless of how long the employee has been employed, and it can be taken flexibly, in individual days, half-days or as a single block.

A few practical points are easy to miss:

• The leave is unpaid by default, although you can choose to offer enhanced contractual pay.
• Employees must give notice equal to twice the length of leave requested, plus one day. So a request for two days off requires five days’ notice.
• You can postpone (but not refuse) a request where it would unduly disrupt the business, and you must offer an alternative date within one month.
• “Dependant” covers a much wider group than many managers realise, including spouses, partners, children, parents, anyone living in the same household, and anyone who reasonably relies on the employee for care.

Why this is back on the agenda

The government has begun a formal review of carer’s leave, with evidence gathering, options development and stakeholder consultation running through 2026. A consultation response and roadmap are expected in late 2026 or early 2027.

The options on the table include extending the duration of leave beyond one week, introducing an element of statutory pay, and broadening the definition of who qualifies. Whatever shape reform eventually takes, employers who haven’t already operationalised the current rules will be at a disadvantage when the changes land.

The areas where we most often see employers slip

Three issues come up repeatedly when we review how our clients (and prospective clients) are handling carer’s leave.

The first is inconsistent record-keeping. Carer’s leave doesn’t sit neatly inside annual leave or sickness absence systems, and many SMEs end up tracking it in spreadsheets or, worse, in informal emails. That makes it hard to demonstrate compliance, hard to spot patterns and hard to identify when an employee is heading toward burnout.

The second is manager confusion. Line managers are usually the first point of contact for a leave request, but few have been trained on what qualifies, what notice is required, or how the postponement provisions work. The result is inconsistent decisions across teams, and the fairness and discrimination risks that come with that.

The third is payroll integration. Although the leave is unpaid, it still needs to be reflected accurately on payslips, pension contributions and statutory calculations such as holiday accrual. Treating it the same as ordinary unpaid leave can cause downstream errors, particularly for hourly-paid or zero-hours workers. This is where we frequently spot issues when we take over a payroll from a previous provider.

Our short checklist for getting it right

Most employers can tighten their approach with a focused review covering five questions:

1. Is carer’s leave called out explicitly in your staff handbook, separate from compassionate or dependants’ leave?
2. Do your line managers have a one-page guide explaining who qualifies, the notice rules and the postponement criteria?
3. Are requests being recorded in a single system that you could produce evidence from if challenged?
4. Is your payroll provider correctly treating carer’s leave so that holiday accrual, pension and statutory pay calculations remain accurate?
5. Have you considered, as a matter of policy, whether to offer paid carer’s leave as a retention tool, particularly in roles where you compete with employers who already do?

A wider point about workforce planning

Beyond pure compliance, carer’s leave is increasingly a workforce-planning issue. ONS figures consistently suggest that around one in eight UK adults provides some form of unpaid care, and the proportion rises sharply in the 45 to 64 age bracket, the heart of most experienced workforces. In our experience, employers who treat carer’s leave as a tick-box statutory minimum tend to lose those employees to organisations that take it seriously.

The forthcoming review may well make some of these choices for employers. The businesses that have already thought through their policy, trained their managers and integrated the leave properly into payroll won’t need to scramble when it does.

How we can help

For over ten years we’ve been helping UK businesses keep their payroll compliant, accurate and aligned with changing employment law, and carer’s leave is exactly the kind of detail that’s easy to overlook until it causes a problem.

Want a second pair of eyes on how carer’s leave is being recorded and processed in your business? We’re happy to take a look. Call us on 020 8143 1529 or email info@pecuniapro.co.uk and we’ll help you tidy the process before any reform arrives.