NHS Income Protection Gap Calculator

This tool builds directly on the same Section 14 tier table used by FrontlinePay's NHS Sick Pay Calculator, sourced directly from paragraph 14.2 of the current NHS Terms and Conditions of Service Handbook: 1 month's full pay and 2 months' half pay during your first year of service; 2 months' full pay and 2 months' half pay in your second year; 4 and 4 in your third year; 5 and 5 in your fourth and fifth years; and 6 months' full pay plus 6 months' half pay once you've completed 5 years of service. Every tier — not just the shortest and the longest — comes from that paragraph, and the wording is identical across the Handbook's England, Wales, and Scotland/Northern Ireland sections.

Because it's a separate, narrower scheme with its own eligibility test, not part of the general Section 14 sickness absence entitlement this calculator is built around. NHS Injury Allowance can extend income protection further, but only specifically for a work-attributable injury or illness sustained in the course of your NHS duties — it doesn't apply to ordinary sickness absence. Folding it into this calculator's default timeline would silently overstate protection for anyone whose absence isn't work-related, so it's left out and flagged clearly instead. If a work injury applies to you, read NHS Income Protection Insurance Explained and speak to your trust's HR team about Section 22 directly.

The rolling 12-month rule (Section 14.7) means your entitlement doesn't refill just because a new sickness episode has technically started — any PAID sick pay, full or half rate, you've already had in the 12 months before a new absence begins is deducted from what's available for that new absence. This calculator deliberately shows your FULL, fresh tier entitlement — the ceiling, assuming this is your first absence in the last 12 months — because it's answering a different question ("where does my protection eventually run out") to the NHS Sick Pay Calculator's question ("what would a specific period of absence, with whatever I've already used, actually pay"). If you've had recent paid sickness absence, your real remaining entitlement is LESS than what's shown here, not the same.

It's designed to pick up exactly where this timeline stops — the point where Section 14 full and half pay run out and, absent NHS Injury Allowance or ill-health retirement, you'd be left on Statutory Sick Pay or no income at all for a long-term condition. A income protection policy typically pays a regular income (commonly 50-70% of your normal pay) from a chosen deferred period until you either recover, retire, or reach the policy's end date. Whether one makes sense for you depends on your savings, dependants, other income sources and how much risk you're comfortable carrying yourself — see NHS Income Protection Insurance Explained for how these policies actually work and what to check before buying one.

They answer genuinely different questions using the same underlying Section 14 data. The NHS Sick Pay Calculator models a SPECIFIC period of absence — how many weeks you've already used in the rolling 12-month window, a planned number of weeks off, and the real net cost to your year once tax and National Insurance are factored in. This calculator instead shows the FULL timeline for your tier from day one, so you can see exactly where full pay ends, where half pay ends, and where the unprotected gap begins — the question it's built to support is "how much of a long-term absence would the NHS actually cover", not "what does this particular absence cost me".

Because SSP is a flat, UK-wide statutory rate that HMRC and DWP typically revise every tax year, usually each April — hardcoding a figure here would go stale within months and risk showing a confidently wrong number. The NHS Sick Pay Calculator asks you to enter the current rate from gov.uk/statutory-sick-pay for exactly this reason, and this tool follows the same principle by not attempting to price the gap zone in £ terms at all — it's shown as "the gap", not as a calculated SSP figure.

Potentially, yes, and that's exactly why this calculator doesn't model it. If a condition is assessed as permanent and you meet your NHS Pension Scheme section's ill-health retirement criteria, you could access pension benefits early — tier 1 or tier 2 depending on how the condition affects your capacity to work — which could change the financial picture completely for a long-term or permanent condition, in a way a simple sick pay timeline can't capture. This tool assumes an ordinary sickness absence with no ill-health retirement outcome; if a permanent or worsening condition is a live possibility for you, that's a conversation for your GP, occupational health and NHS Pensions, not something this calculator can responsibly estimate.

No. It's an illustrative timeline based on a first, fresh absence, built entirely from the same sourced Section 14 tier table used across FrontlinePay's sick pay tools. It doesn't apply the rolling 12-month rule, doesn't model NHS Injury Allowance, doesn't calculate an actual SSP amount, and doesn't model ill-health retirement — any one of those could move the real gap earlier or later, or change how it's funded, for your actual circumstances. Use this to understand the shape of the problem, not as a substitute for checking your own position with your trust's HR team, your NHS Pension Scheme section, or an independent financial adviser before making decisions around income protection.