NI Teacher Sick Pay Explained (2026)

Searches for Northern Ireland teacher sick pay tend to return either the England and Wales Burgundy Book by mistake, or thin summaries that reproduce the same four-row table without saying where it actually comes from. Neither is wrong about the numbers. Both miss the point that matters most for a Northern Ireland teacher working out their own entitlement: the document you need is not the Burgundy Book, and the document you do need has a few provisions the Burgundy Book does not.

The scale, and why it looks so familiar

Regulation 19 of the Teachers' Salaries Regulations (Northern Ireland) 1993 — SR 1993 No. 318 — is headed "Absence due to illness", and paragraph (1) sets out the scale in almost the same words a Burgundy Book reader would recognise:

The four-month condition attaches to the half-rate element only, exactly as it does in the Burgundy Book: a first-year teacher gets the 25 full-rate days from day one, but only qualifies for the 50 half-rate days once four months' service has actually been completed. A teacher appointed from a date other than 1 April is deemed, for this purpose, to have been appointed from the preceding 1 April, but still has to complete four months of actual service before the half-rate element is available.

It would be easy to stop there and conclude Northern Ireland simply copied the Burgundy Book scale into a different filing cabinet. That is close to true of the headline numbers, and we are not going to manufacture a difference in the table above that does not exist — this site's other Northern Ireland pages have found genuinely distinct structures elsewhere (a leadership pay spine with no English equivalent, fixed-value Teaching Allowances instead of banded TLRs), and it would be dishonest to force sick pay into that pattern if the scale itself does not support it. What does differ, and differs in a way that changes how the entitlement actually behaves, is everything the next section covers.

The legal mechanism that actually matters more than the numbers

In England and Wales, the Burgundy Book is a national collective agreement negotiated between the teacher unions and local authority employers. It has no statutory force of its own. It becomes binding on a particular teacher only once it is incorporated into that teacher's individual contract of employment — which happens, in practice, for the great majority of maintained-school teachers, but is a matter of contract rather than law. That is precisely why academy trusts, which are not party to the Burgundy Book, are free to write different sick pay terms into their own contracts, and why the England guide on this site has an entire section on checking your own contract rather than assuming the Book applies.

Northern Ireland has no equivalent gap to worry about, because the scale sits in a different kind of document altogether. Regulation 19 is part of a statutory instrument made by the Department of Education under powers in the Education and Libraries (Northern Ireland) Order 1986, sealed with the Department's official seal on 16 July 1993 and in force from 1 April 1993. A statutory instrument does not need to be incorporated into a contract to bind an employer — it applies directly, by force of law, to every teacher and every grant-aided school it covers. Northern Ireland has no academy-style category of school that sits outside the state system in the way England's does, so the incorporation question the Burgundy Book guide spends a section on simply does not arise here in the same form.

This is not a purely academic distinction. It means a Northern Ireland teacher does not need to ask "does my contract actually incorporate this scheme" the way an England-based teacher in an academy trust does — the question does not apply. It also means changes to the scheme happen the way secondary legislation changes: by amendment regulation, laid and made by the Department, rather than by fresh negotiation between unions and employers reaching a new collective text. Both routes have been used to update pay figures since 1993; the sick leave scale in Regulation 19 itself, expressed in working days rather than cash, has proved durable across those amendments.

Service, the sick leave year, and the 31 March rule

Regulation 19 runs on the same annual cycle as the Burgundy Book: paragraph (1) opens by defining the relevant year as one "which shall be deemed to end on 31st March" — so the sick leave year is 1 April to 31 March, not the academic year and not your appointment anniversary.

Two further rules will be familiar to anyone who has read the England guide on this site, because they do materially the same job through the regulation's own wording rather than through a collective agreement's paragraph numbering:

• Still absent on 31 March carries you into the old year, not a new one. Regulation 19(5) provides that the period from 1 April until you return to duty is treated as part of the preceding year's entitlement, not as the start of a fresh allowance. The clock only resets once you have actually resumed duty.
• 'Service' means UK-wide service, subject to a recent-Northern-Ireland-service condition. Regulation 18(3) defines 'service' for these purposes as service in the United Kingdom, so teaching experience in England, Scotland or Wales counts in principle. The regulations as originally made also required a minimum period of continuous service immediately in Northern Ireland before an absence begins — three months for a full-time teacher, six months for a part-time one — and we flag in the sources section below that we could not fully verify whether a later amendment removed that immediate-service condition.

Where Regulation 19 is more explicit than the Burgundy Book is in defining "full rate" itself. Paragraph 18(2) states that, for a part-time teacher, "full rate" means the rate of remuneration that would have been payable had the teacher not been absent — a deliberately protective definition that ties the half-pay calculation to what the individual would actually have earned, rather than to a generic full-time figure.

Sickness around school closures, and your separate annual leave entitlement

Regulation 19(6) and (7) between them do the same job as the Burgundy Book's closure-period paragraphs, and reach the same practical outcome. If you are ill immediately before a school holiday and remain ill through it, you continue to be paid at whatever rate — full or half — applied on the last working day before the closure, and the closure period itself does not count against your Regulation 19(1) entitlement. If you recover during the holiday and a doctor certifies you fit, you are treated as having returned to duty on the date of that certificate rather than the first day of term — provided you actually return to teaching on the first day back.

Separately, Regulation 19(9) extends the same logic further than the Burgundy Book's equivalent provision does: any non-working days falling within a period of illness — not just school closures — are paid at whatever rate applied on the last working day immediately before them.

The genuinely distinctive piece sits outside Regulation 19 altogether, in a 2011 agreement that has no Burgundy Book counterpart at all, because it answers a question the Burgundy Book does not need to ask.

The practical trigger is long absences that straddle a return close to 31 August, or absences running past 52 weeks. For most teachers with shorter absences the school holidays simply absorb the statutory entitlement as they always do and TNC 2011/3 never becomes visible. It is worth knowing about precisely because it only surfaces when things have already gone on a long time — exactly when the detail is easiest to overlook.

Certification: the three-day and twenty-day rules

Regulation 19(8) makes certification a condition of entitlement rather than a separate administrative requirement layered on top of it, and it is worth reading the actual mechanics rather than assuming they mirror the Burgundy Book's fourth-working-day notification and eighth-day Fit Note.

• A teacher absent through illness is not entitled to salary for more than three successive days unless they furnish a self-certificate (for absences of less than eight successive days) or a medical certificate (for absences of eight days or more).
• A teacher who has been absent through illness for a total of 20 working days in a sick leave year, without having furnished a medical certificate for any of those days, is not entitled to salary for any further sickness absence in that year unless a medical certificate is then furnished.

The second rule is the one that catches people out, because it is cumulative across a whole sick leave year rather than tied to any single absence. A teacher who takes several short, self-certificated absences — a day here, three days there, each comfortably under the eight-day medical-certificate threshold — can nonetheless reach the 20-day cumulative total and find that a further short absence is not automatically covered, because no medical certificate has ever been produced for any of the earlier days. TNC 2008/2, the Teacher Attendance Procedure, quotes this exact provision to principals as Regulation 19(8)(b) and treats it as the trigger for requiring a doctor's statement going forward.

Pulmonary tuberculosis, and the general infectious-disease provision that isn't there

Regulation 19(10) gives tuberculosis its own automatic rule, outside the ordinary sliding scale: where an absence is certified by a registered medical practitioner to be due to pulmonary tuberculosis, full salary is paid for the first twelve months of the absence, and salary at half rate for a further period not exceeding six months after that.

Read that against the Burgundy Book's equivalent provision and there is a real difference in how automatic the extension is. Burgundy Book paragraph 10.2 gives full salary for the first twelve months and then leaves further full or half pay to the employer's discretion. Regulation 19(10) does not leave the second period to discretion at all — the further six months at half rate is a statutory entitlement, not something an employer chooses to grant.

What Regulation 19 does not contain is anything resembling the Burgundy Book's broader paragraph 10 protection for infectious or contagious illness generally, or its household-exposure provision. We searched specifically for a Northern Ireland equivalent and did not find one in the statutory scale itself. If a Northern Ireland teacher's absence is genuinely linked to an infection caught at work outside the specific case of tuberculosis, Regulation 19 treats it as ordinary illness running against the ordinary scale, and any additional protection would have to come from the employer's own discretion under Regulation 20 rather than from an automatic statutory carve-out.

Injury, accident or assault at work: the ring-fence that isn't there

That is a genuine structural difference, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not mean in practice. It does not mean a Northern Ireland employer cannot respond generously to a teacher injured or assaulted at work — Regulation 20 gives a relevant body a general discretion to grant leave of absence with or without salary, and a board of governors is entirely free to use that discretion to give a teacher extra paid leave following a work-related injury without touching their Regulation 19 entitlement at all. What is missing is the automatic, statutory version of that protection that Burgundy Book teachers can simply point to. In Northern Ireland it is a request to be made, not an entitlement to be claimed.

If this applies to you, the practical step is to raise Regulation 20 explicitly, in writing, with your employing authority and your union, rather than assuming a work-related cause automatically protects your ordinary sick pay days the way it would in England or Wales. TNC 2008/2 also directs a teacher to inform the Principal where an absence is due to an accident outside school and a third-party damages claim is or will be involved — a distinct point about recovering costs, not about protecting the Regulation 19 scale.

Statutory Sick Pay in Northern Ireland after the April 2026 reforms

Statutory Sick Pay changed for the whole of the UK in April 2026, and Northern Ireland's version of the change sits in its own sections of the same Act, because employment law is a devolved matter for the Northern Ireland Assembly rather than something Westminster legislates for Northern Ireland directly.

Sections 12 and 13 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 make the Northern Ireland equivalent of what sections 10 and 11 do for Great Britain, and all four sections were commenced together, on 6 April 2026, by the Employment Rights Act 2025 (Commencement No. 3 and Transitional Provisions) Regulations 2026, SI 2026/373.

• Waiting days abolished. SSP is payable from the first qualifying day of sickness absence rather than from the fourth.
• The Lower Earnings Limit is removed. SSP no longer depends on earning at or above the LEL, bringing low-paid and low-hours employees into scope who were previously excluded.

The rate is identical to Great Britain's: the lower of £123.25 a week or 80% of normal weekly earnings, for a maximum of 28 weeks, paid by the employer through payroll. On expiry, or where an employee was never eligible, the employer issues form SSP1, supporting a claim for New Style Employment and Support Allowance or Universal Credit. None of this is a Northern Ireland variation on the substance — it is the same reform, delivered through separate but identically drafted legislative sections because Northern Ireland needed its own vehicle to enact it.

How attendance is managed, and when sick pay can be suspended

Alongside Regulation 19's entitlement, day-to-day management of a teacher's sickness absence runs under TNC 2008/2, the Teacher Attendance Procedure, agreed by the management and teachers' sides of the Teachers' Negotiating Committee. It sets out notification requirements, the Principal's monitoring role, attendance meetings, and referral to Occupational Health — and it contains two provisions that can genuinely stop sick pay before Regulation 19's own scale is exhausted.

• Suspension pending an Occupational Health referral. Where a teacher submits a Fitness to Return to Work certificate but cannot resume teaching because they are awaiting referral to an Occupational Health Physician, sick pay is suspended from the date of that certificate. If the Occupational Health report confirms continued unfitness, payment resumes in accordance with Regulation 19.
• Suspension pending an appeal against a fit-to-return decision. Where the Employing Authority's medical adviser decides a teacher is fit to return and the teacher disagrees, an appeal can be lodged within five working days, supported by new medical evidence. Sick pay is suspended from the expected return date while the appeal is heard, and is restored only if the appeal succeeds.

TNC 2008/2 also sets out three tiers of absence management — short-term, persistent intermittent, and long-term — with long-term defined as four continuous weeks or more, triggering assessment in consultation with the employing authority and, typically, referral to Occupational Health. None of this changes how many days of full or half pay a teacher is entitled to; it governs the process around reaching, monitoring and occasionally interrupting that entitlement.

Long-term absence, occupational health, and termination on medical grounds

Where attendance does not improve, TNC 2008/2 sets out two distinct end points, and it matters which one applies. Retirement on the grounds of ill health, with the associated Teachers' Pension Scheme benefits, is only granted where a Department-appointed occupational health physician forms the opinion that the teacher is permanently incapable of carrying out their teaching duties. Termination on the grounds of ill health or capability is a different route: where the available medical evidence indicates a teacher is not fit to return within a reasonable period, the Board of Governors may, after consultation with the teacher and their representative, terminate the contract, under the separate procedure Termination of Employment of Teachers on the Grounds of Ill Health or Capability, TNC 2000/4.

Running out of Regulation 19 sick pay and an ill-health retirement application are separate processes on separate timetables, and — as with every jurisdiction we have covered on this site — they frequently overlap badly, with an application still in progress after the money has stopped. If long-term incapacity looks like a realistic possibility, start that conversation with the Department's pensions branch and your union while pay is still coming in, not after Regulation 19's scale is exhausted.

Your pension while you are off sick

This is one area where we can state the general legal position but cannot point to a Northern Ireland-specific published threshold in the way Teachers' Pensions publishes one for England and Wales. Periods of absence for which a teacher is entitled to full salary or salary at half rate under Regulation 19 are treated as teaching service for the purposes of the Teachers' Salaries Regulations themselves — so pay progression and length of service are protected while you remain on full or half pay. The Northern Ireland Teachers' Pension Scheme sits on its own statutory basis, principally the Teachers' Superannuation Regulations (Northern Ireland) 1998 as amended, administered by the Department of Education.

Who the scale does not cover

Regulation 18 defines "teacher", for the purposes of both the sick pay regulation and the general leave-of-absence regulation that follows it, in a way that excludes one significant group. A "teacher" for Regulation 19 means a full-time teacher other than a temporary teacher paid at the daily rate of one 195th of an annual salary, and a part-time teacher paid under the relevant salary provision.

In practice that draws the same line England and Wales draw under the Burgundy Book: a teacher engaged on a genuine daily supply rate has no Regulation 19 sick pay entitlement at all and falls back on Statutory Sick Pay alone, while a teacher on a fixed-term contract paid an annual salary — covering a maternity leave or a term of absence, for instance — is a "teacher" for this purpose and is covered. Since April 2026, daily-rate supply teachers in Northern Ireland are better protected by SSP than they were before, for the same reasons as in Great Britain: no minimum earnings threshold and no waiting days.

Part-time teachers are covered on the same sliding scale as full-time teachers, with "full rate" defined, for this purpose, by reference to what they would actually have earned had they not been absent — so a part-time teacher's half-pay calculation is anchored to their own actual pay rather than to a full-time equivalent figure.

Who actually administers and pays it

Regulation 19 is the legal source of the entitlement, but it does not itself run payroll. In practice, who actually processes and pays a Northern Ireland teacher's sick pay depends on who employs them. The Education Authority — formed in 2015 from the merger of the five former Education and Library Boards — is the employing authority for the controlled sector and administers the scheme for those schools. The Council for Catholic Maintained Schools (CCMS) performs the equivalent role for Catholic maintained schools. For voluntary grammar and other grant-maintained schools, the board of governors is typically the employer, applying the same Regulation 19 entitlement under the same Department of Education framework. This is also the structure named as the "audience" for the Department's own circulars on teacher absence — Education and Library Boards (now the Education Authority), CCMS, and the managers, boards of governors and principals of grant-aided schools generally — and it is a useful list to check if you are unsure who, in practice, holds your sickness absence record and pay decisions.

What to check on your own record

Because the entitlement is built into a statutory instrument rather than a document your school chooses to adopt, there is no "does my contract incorporate this" question for a Northern Ireland teacher to ask. There is still a short list worth checking, particularly if an absence is running long.

• Which band of Regulation 19(1) you are actually on, based on your genuine length of aggregated UK service — not simply your length of service at your current school.
• Whether you have furnished a medical certificate for at least one day within any run of absences that might, cumulatively, be approaching the 20-working-day threshold in Regulation 19(8)(b).
• The exact dates your full-rate and half-rate periods are due to end, in writing from your employing authority, well before either date arrives.
• If your absence followed an accident, injury or assault at work, whether your employer has considered exercising its Regulation 20 discretion — this will not happen automatically, so it needs to be raised.
• Whether a long absence is on course to disrupt your statutory annual leave under TNC 2011/3, particularly if it is likely to run past 52 weeks or return close to 31 August.
• Whether pension contributions are still being deducted correctly once you move from full to half pay, confirmed directly with the Department's pensions branch rather than assumed.

Sources, and what we could not verify

The sick pay scale and its surrounding rules are drawn directly from Regulation 19 (and the related Regulation 18 definitions and Regulation 20) of the Teachers' Salaries Regulations (Northern Ireland) 1993, SR 1993 No. 318, as made. The attendance-management detail, including the suspension provisions and the certification cross-reference to Regulation 19(8)(b), comes from TNC 2008/2, the Teacher Attendance Procedure. The annual leave interaction comes from TNC 2011/3, Statutory Annual Leave Entitlement and Long Term Sickness Absence. The Statutory Sick Pay detail comes from the Employment Rights Act 2025 and the Employment Rights Act 2025 (Commencement No. 3 and Transitional Provisions) Regulations 2026.

Primary sources: The Teachers' Salaries Regulations (Northern Ireland) 1993, SR 1993 No. 318; TNC 2008/2 — Teacher Attendance Procedure; TNC 2011/3 — Statutory Annual Leave Entitlement and Long Term Sickness Absence; Employment Rights Act 2025, section 12 (Northern Ireland); The Employment Rights Act 2025 (Commencement No. 3 and Transitional Provisions) Regulations 2026, SI 2026/373; Major changes to Statutory Sick Pay in Northern Ireland from April 2026 — Law Centre NI; DE Circular 2014/18 — Teachers' Absences Not Exceeding Three Working Days; Teachers' pay: common issues — Department of Education; Burgundy Book Sick Pay: The Full Scale — this site's England and Wales guide.

What we could not verify. Four points. First, whether the immediate-Northern-Ireland-service condition in Regulation 19(2) and (3) — three months for a full-time teacher, six months for a part-time one, immediately before an absence begins — remains in force as originally made. A secondary source states that a 1993 amendment regulation removed this qualifying period, but we could not obtain and read the amending instrument's text directly to confirm it, so we have described the base regulation and flagged the possible amendment rather than asserting either version with confidence. Second, whether the current regulations contain an explicit clause requiring Statutory Sick Pay or other state benefits to be offset against Regulation 19 salary — an express abatement clause exists in a much earlier (1949) predecessor instrument we found in passing, but we could not locate an equivalent express clause in the current regulations, even though the practical effect of salary not exceeding ordinary pay would very likely achieve something similar. Third, the exact NITPS pensionability threshold during sick leave, discussed in the pension section above. Fourth, whether any Northern Ireland-specific injury-at-work or assault-leave scheme exists outside the statutory scale and TNC 2008/2 that we simply did not locate — we searched specifically and found the Republic of Ireland has a distinct assault-leave scheme for its own teachers, which is not the same jurisdiction and does not apply in Northern Ireland, but we cannot rule out a smaller, less-published Northern Ireland arrangement we did not find. On all four, your employing authority or union branch is the right source to confirm the current position.