UK Bereavement Leave and Pregnancy Loss Rights: The Employer Compliance Guide Before April 2027

For most UK employers, bereavement policy has lived in the gap between the goodwill of individual line managers and the thin, unpaid fallback of "time off for dependants" — a short statutory safety net that was never designed to carry the weight of grief. On 22 September 2026, that gap began to close. The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (DBIST), together with Kate Dearden MP, the Minister for the Future of Work, announced that a new statutory right to bereavement leave will come into force in April 2027 — and that, for the first time, the right reaches beyond the death of a child to cover the death of a spouse or partner, a parent, an adult child or a sibling, and the loss of a pregnancy before 24 weeks.

If you run payroll, write HR policy, or advise owner-managed businesses, this change lands on your desk in the next six months. This guide sets out exactly what the government announced, how the new right will sit beside the Parental Bereavement Leave and Pay regime that is already in force, and the practical steps a compliant employer should be taking now — before the April 2027 commencement date arrives.

What changed on 22 September 2026 — and when it bites

The announcement came in a government press release published on 22 September 2026 under the headline "No one should have to fight for time to grieve". Issued by the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, with Kate Dearden MP, the Minister for the Future of Work, fronting the change, it confirmed that ministers will introduce a new right to bereavement leave, from April 2027, for employees who lose a spouse or partner, parent, adult child or sibling — with the definition of family explicitly extended to cover step, half, adoptive, kinship care and foster relationships.

The same announcement carried a second, and in many ways more significant, reform. Women and partners who experience a pregnancy loss before 24 weeks — including miscarriage, terminations and unsuccessful IVF embryo transfers — will be entitled to up to two weeks of unpaid leave. That entitlement is not limited to the pregnant employee herself: it extends to partners, the other biological parent, and intended parents in a surrogacy arrangement. Until now, pregnancy loss before 24 weeks has sat almost entirely outside statutory leave rights, leaving employees to rely on sick pay, discretionary compassion, or the unpaid dependants fallback.

Alongside the press release, the government published its formal response to the "Consultation on leave for bereavement including pregnancy loss" — a 50-page document that sets out how the right will work in practice. Both documents confirm the delivery mechanism: the right flows from the Employment Rights Act 2025, which created the framework for a new day-one right to unpaid bereavement leave, with the detail to be switched on through secondary legislation, the measures coming into force in April 2027.

The "when it bites" question therefore has two answers. Legally, nothing changed on 22 September 2026 — no employee can invoke the new right yet. Operationally, everything changed: employers now have a known commencement date, a known policy design, and a known compliance deadline. Businesses that treat September 2026 to April 2027 as a preparation window, rather than dead time, will avoid the scramble that typically follows statutory leave reforms.

Source: UK government via Wikimedia Commons — OGL 3.0

Who qualifies: mapping the relationships and the pregnancy-loss trigger

Getting eligibility right is the heart of compliance, because the new right deliberately casts a wider net than most existing leave entitlements. Based on the announcement and the government response, the mapping looks like this.

Bereavement of a close family member. The right is triggered by the death of:

• a spouse or partner (including civil partners)
• a parent
• an adult child
• a sibling

Crucially, each of these relationships is defined broadly. Step-relations, half-relations, adoptive relations, kinship care arrangements and foster relations are all expressly included. An employee who lost the stepfather who raised them, the half-sister they only reconnected with last year, or a child they fostered is covered on the same footing as an employee who lost a spouse. HR policy language that quietly narrows "family" to blood and marriage will fail here.

Pregnancy loss before 24 weeks. The second trigger covers the loss of a pregnancy before the 24-week point, and the government's list is explicit: it includes miscarriage, terminations, and unsuccessful IVF embryo transfers. Three features deserve attention:

1. Who can take it. Not only the pregnant employee. Partners, the other biological parent, and intended parents in a surrogacy arrangement are all entitled to the leave. A male employee whose partner suffered a miscarriage at eight weeks is covered; so are intended parents whose surrogate pregnancy ended before 24 weeks.
2. The 24-week boundary is the pivot of the whole system. Loss before 24 weeks falls under the new unpaid right; stillbirth after 24 weeks, and the death of a child, fall under the existing Parental Bereavement Leave and Pay regime — which is paid. Employers will need to handle that boundary with exceptional sensitivity, because it decides whether an employee is in a paid or an unpaid regime at the most vulnerable moment of their working life.
3. Day-one right. There is no qualifying service period. An employee who started work on Monday and suffers a bereavement on Wednesday has the right, exactly as a twenty-year veteran does.

No size-based carve-out. It is worth stating plainly, because many small owner-managers assume new employment rights arrive with a small-employer exemption attached: nothing in the press release or the 50-page government response creates any size-based exemption for the new unpaid right. It applies to all employers, regardless of headcount. (The only small-employer relief in this area of law attaches to the existing pay regime, discussed below.)

The two regimes compared: new bereavement leave vs Parental Bereavement Leave

From April 2027, UK employers will operate two parallel bereavement regimes, and most workplace deaths will be handled under the new one. The table below is the compliance centerpiece: print it, circulate it to line managers, and build your policy around it.

Three consequences flow from this comparison and should shape your policy drafting.

First, the paid/unpaid line is arbitrary from the employee's perspective, and your policy needs to soften it. An employee whose baby was stillborn at 25 weeks gets two paid weeks; an employee who lost a pregnancy at 23 weeks gets an unpaid entitlement. An employee who lost a child under 18 gets paid leave; an employee who lost an adult son aged 19 — or a spouse, or a parent — gets unpaid leave. Many employers already top up statutory family pay; the question of extending similar generosity here is examined below.

Second, the two regimes run in parallel, not in sequence. A stillbirth after 24 weeks is Parental Bereavement Leave. A miscarriage at 20 weeks followed, months later, by the death of the employee's mother is the new right. Situations can also combine: an employee may take Parental Bereavement Leave for a child's death and, within the same 56 weeks, face another bereavement under the new right. Your records need to track which regime, which clock, and which balance is being drawn down.

Third, do not assume today's baseline disappears. Parental Bereavement Leave and Pay remains exactly as it is — two weeks, day one, taken in one-week blocks within 56 weeks of the child's death, with Statutory Parental Bereavement Pay at £194.32 a week or 90% of average weekly earnings (whichever is lower) for 2026/27, and with employers able to reclaim 92% of the cost, or 109% under Small Employers' Relief. Employees exercising it are protected from detriment and dismissal.

How the new right will work in practice: weeks, days, windows, notice and evidence

The government response document fills in the mechanics, and these details are what your policy annexes and HR-system configurations will need to encode.

Up to two weeks, calibrated to the working pattern. Employees can take up to two weeks of leave, based on their average working pattern. For a five-day-a-week employee, that is a maximum of ten days; for someone working three days a week, six days. The entitlement is expressed in weeks worked, not a flat ten-day allowance.

A 56-week window, measured from death, loss — or knowledge. Leave can be taken within 56 weeks of the bereavement. The clock starts from the date of death or pregnancy loss, or the date of knowledge — the date the employee learned of it. That "date of knowledge" proviso matters for deaths that occur abroad, or where family estrangement delayed the news. Grief does not follow a schedule, and the legislation reflects that: an employee may need the leave months later, around the first anniversary, and the right will still be there.

Discontinuous single days. Leave may be taken in discontinuous, single days. An employee might take the day of the funeral, return for a week, take the day they empty their mother's flat, return again, and take a day when the inquest concludes. Your scheduling and payroll systems need to handle a day here and a day there — not just monolithic fortnights.

A two-track notice model. For leave taken within the first eight weeks of the bereavement, notice is only required before the employee starts work — meaning an employee can notify you in the morning and be on bereavement leave the same day. For leave taken after the first eight weeks, at least one week's notice is required. There is no prescribed form: as law firm Lewis Silkin observed in its 24 September 2026 analysis, a WhatsApp message or a Teams chat is acceptable notice. Your policy should say so explicitly, because managers who demand "a proper email" will be imposing requirements the law does not.

No evidence may be required. The press release is unequivocal: "No one will be asked or required to provide evidence of their loss." That is not a courtesy — it is the design. A death certificate, a hospital letter, a funeral programme: none of it may be demanded as a condition of the leave. This is the single most common way well-meaning HR processes will breach the new right, so build the "no evidence" rule into manager training verbatim.

What the right is not. It is not paid. The government expressly ruled out statutory pay for the new entitlement. It is also not a replacement for the existing dependants fallback — the short unpaid time off for dependants remains for emergencies that do not qualify here — nor for sickness rights where grief becomes illness.

Employer duties: a step-by-step readiness checklist before April 2027

The announcement gives you a roughly six-month runway. Here is a practical readiness sequence, ordered so that each step feeds the next.

1. Audit your current bereavement policy now. Pull out what you offer today: statutory minimum, discretionary paid compassionate leave, or a contractual entitlement. Map every existing promise against the new right, because from April 2027 the statutory floor rises and any contractual wording that is narrower than the statute will need rewriting.
2. Rewrite the policy around the two-regime table. Draft a single bereavement policy that covers both the new right and Parental Bereavement Leave and Pay, using the comparison table above as the structure. Spell out the 24-week boundary, the qualifying relationships (including step, half, adoptive, kinship and foster), and the surrogacy coverage.
3. Make the pay decision deliberately. The statute is silent on generosity; your policy should not be. Decide whether you will pay above the unpaid minimum, for how long, at what rate, and for which bereavements — and record the decision with costings (the costing framework is below).
4. Codify the notice model in plain language. Tell employees: notice before you start work in the first eight weeks; a week's notice after that; any channel — text, WhatsApp, Teams, a phone call — is fine. Tell managers the same thing, in those words.
5. Write the "no evidence" rule into the system, not just the policy. Configure your HR platform so no bereavement-leave request triggers a document-upload prompt. If your current workflow asks for proof, that workflow becomes unlawful in April 2027.
6. Train line managers before the law, not after the first case. Managers are the front line of this right. Scenario-based training should cover: the employee who messages at 7am on the funeral day; the employee who asks for single scattered days across a year; the employee whose IVF transfer failed; the request you may not question.
7. Fix your record-keeping. You need to track, per employee: the date of death or loss (or date of knowledge), the 56-week window, days taken, days remaining, and which regime applies. Discontinuous single days make manual tracking fragile; if you run HR software, check now whether it supports this pattern, and if you buy HR systems, make this a vendor question in your next procurement round.
8. Plan payroll two cycles ahead. Unpaid leave still touches payroll: pro-rata salary adjustments, interaction with holiday accrual, and — for the existing paid regime — SPBP calculations and the 92%/109% reclaim. Brief payroll in January, not March.
9. Brief the business on what was announced, in the government's own terms. The change was welcomed across the spectrum: more than eight in ten employers and nine in ten business representative organisations supported bereavement leave following the death of an immediate family member, according to the press release. Framing this as a supported, expected change — not a burden — lands better with owner-managers.

Source: Fertifa — guidance for HR leaders on pregnancy-loss bereavement leave

Timeline: from a 1,900-response consultation to April 2027

The right arriving in April 2027 was not improvised. The consultation on leave for bereavement, including pregnancy loss, opened on 23 October 2025 under the Make Work Pay programme. It drew an unusually engaged response: the government's response document records over 1,900 responses, with 1,813 on the question of leave duration alone. On the design question that drew most public attention — whether partners should be covered for pregnancy loss — 93% of respondents said yes, and the government agreed.

Source: Adrian Pingstone / Wikimedia Commons — Public domain

The consultation closed, and on 22 September 2026 the government published its response alongside the press release. The response sets out the next steps plainly: implement secondary legislation, with measures coming into force in April 2027, and publish guidance for employers and employees. In other words, between now and commencement, two documents still matter: the secondary legislation itself, and the promised statutory guidance.

The reform also has a place in the wider programme. The Department's implementation roadmap for the Plan to Make Work Pay lists bereavement leave among the measures that will take effect in 2027, following the April 2026 tranche that is already live — including day-one paternity leave and the removal of the lower earnings limit for Statutory Sick Pay. Employers tracking the whole programme can see our Employment Rights Act 2025–2027 implementation timeline for where this change sits among the other commencement dates.

For planning purposes, the milestones to diarise are:

• 23 October 2025 — consultation opens
• 22 September 2026 — government response and announcement: April 2027 commencement confirmed
• Before April 2027 — secondary legislation and guidance for employers and employees expected
• April 2027 — the new right comes into force

The pay decision: unpaid in law, paid by policy

The government's most consequential design choice — and its most criticised — is that the new right is unpaid. Statutory pay was expressly ruled out. For a full-time employee, two unpaid weeks means forgoing two full weeks of earnings at the moment their household income is often most fragile: a funeral to pay for, a partner's income interrupted, IVF debts outstanding.

The tension is not going unremarked. Vicki Robinson, chief executive of Miscarriage UK, welcomed the pregnancy-loss coverage while telling the government plainly: "We still strongly believe bereavement leave should be paid." Business voices took a different posture — the CBI's Matthew Percival was quoted welcoming the announcement — and the TUC's general secretary Paul Nowak welcomed the reform while pointing out, as HR trade press noted, that until April 2027 the only fallback remains unpaid time off for dependants.

So the pay decision lands on individual employers. The framework for thinking about it:

The statutory minimum is nothing — and that is a floor for generosity, not a target. The law sets a floor of unpaid job-protected leave. Many employers already sit above the floor. The rational costing base is the existing paid regime: Statutory Parental Bereavement Pay is £194.32 a week (or 90% of average weekly earnings, whichever is lower) from 6 April 2026, with 92% recoverable by employers — 109% under Small Employers' Relief, meaning the smallest employers reclaim more than they pay out.

Cost, at this scale, is modest and predictable. Bereavement leave is, mercifully, a rare event per employee. An employer offering two paid weeks at the SPBP-equivalent rate is insuring against an infrequent, bounded, two-week liability — and buying retention, engagement and reputation in a labour market where treatment at the worst moments of an employee's life is remembered and retold for years.

Whatever you decide, decide it in writing before April 2027. The worst outcome is improvisation: one manager granting paid leave, another refusing, an equality question following. A one-paragraph pay clause — who gets paid, how much, for which bereavements — converts an emotive manager-level judgement into a predictable policy.

Watch the guidance. The promised employer guidance may address pay interaction (occupational sick pay, holiday accrual during unpaid leave, pension contributions). Decisions taken now should be reviewed against that guidance when it lands.

What is still missing — and what to watch next

An honest compliance guide should be clear about what is not yet settled, because the gap between announcement and commencement is where policies go stale.

The secondary legislation is not yet in force. The detail confirmed so far — two weeks, 56-week window, single days, notice model, no evidence — comes from the government response and announcement. The laying of the actual regulations is the moment to re-verify every parameter against the enacted text before your policy goes to the board.

The statutory guidance has not been published. Government has committed to publish guidance for employers and employees. Practical questions — interaction with holiday, sickness, and other family rights; how the average working pattern is calculated for atypical workers; how the date of knowledge is evidenced without demanding evidence — will likely be answered there. Assign someone to read it on publication day.

Pay remains the open wound. The government has ruled out statutory pay for this Parliament's version of the right; Miscarriage UK and parts of the campaign movement have not accepted that as final. Employers designing policies now should build in a review clause, because a future move to a paid entitlement is a live campaigning possibility, not a fantasy.

No small-employer exemption exists — but also no small-employer burden beyond administration. The absence of a size threshold cuts both ways: every employer must comply with the unpaid right, but the right itself costs nothing in statutory pay. The compliance cost is administrative: policy, training, record-keeping.

And one thing to remember about the present. Until April 2027, an employee losing a parent, a sibling, or a pregnancy at 12 weeks has no statutory bereavement leave beyond the short unpaid time off for dependants. Employers who can act on their policy early — applying the new design voluntarily from, say, January 2027 — will not breach anything, and will not regret it.

Frequently asked questions

When does the new bereavement leave start in the UK?

The new right to bereavement leave — covering the death of a spouse or partner, parent, adult child or sibling, and pregnancy loss before 24 weeks — comes into force in April 2027, via secondary legislation under the Employment Rights Act 2025. The government announced this on 22 September 2026. Until then, the existing Parental Bereavement Leave and Pay regime (for a child's death or stillbirth after 24 weeks) and unpaid time off for dependants remain the statutory fallbacks.

Is the new bereavement leave paid?

No. The new right is a day-one right to unpaid leave, and the government expressly ruled out statutory pay for it. This contrasts with the existing Parental Bereavement Leave and Pay regime, which is paid at £194.32 a week or 90% of average weekly earnings (whichever is lower) from 6 April 2026. Individual employers can choose to pay above the unpaid minimum through their own policy — a decision worth taking in writing before April 2027.

Who qualifies for the new pregnancy-loss leave?

Anyone who experiences a pregnancy loss before 24 weeks — including miscarriage, terminations and unsuccessful IVF embryo transfers — is entitled to up to two weeks of unpaid leave. This expressly covers the pregnant employee, partners, the other biological parent, and intended parents in a surrogacy arrangement. Loss after 24 weeks (stillbirth) instead falls under the existing Parental Bereavement Leave and Pay regime, which is paid.

What notice must an employee give under the new right?

For leave taken within the first eight weeks of the bereavement, the employee only needs to give notice before starting work — same-day notice is valid. For leave taken after the first eight weeks, at least one week's notice is required. There is no prescribed form: a WhatsApp message or Teams chat is acceptable notice, according to Lewis Silkin's analysis of the government response.

Can an employer ask for evidence of the death or pregnancy loss?

No. The government's announcement states plainly that "no one will be asked or required to provide evidence of their loss". Employers cannot condition the leave on a death certificate, hospital letter or any other documentation. This is a core design feature of the right, and HR workflows that prompt employees to upload proof should be reconfigured before April 2027.

How is the new right different from Parental Bereavement Leave?

Parental Bereavement Leave and Pay — in force now — covers the death of a child under 18 or stillbirth after 24 weeks, gives two paid weeks in one-week blocks, and pays £194.32 a week or 90% of average weekly earnings. The new right, from April 2027, covers a wider circle of bereavements (spouse/partner, parent, adult child, sibling, plus step, half, adoptive, kinship and foster relations) and pregnancy loss before 24 weeks, but is unpaid and can be taken as discontinuous single days within 56 weeks.

Source: GOV.UK — Crown copyright Open Government Licence

Sources

• GOV.UK press release, 22 September 2026: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/no-one-should-have-to-fight-for-time-to-grieve-new-rights-for-family-bereavement-and-pregnancy-loss
• Government response PDF — "Consultation on leave for bereavement including pregnancy loss: government response", 22 September 2026 (OGL v3.0): https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6ab1479d65fe7986cbeb540d/leave-for-bereavement-including-pregnancy-loss-government-response.pdf
• Consultation page (opened 23 October 2025; concluded): https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/make-work-pay-leave-for-bereavement-including-pregnancy-loss
• Employer guide — Parental Bereavement Pay and Leave: https://www.gov.uk/employers-parental-bereavement-pay-leave
• Employee guide — Parental Bereavement Pay and Leave: https://www.gov.uk/parental-bereavement-pay-leave
• Rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rates-and-thresholds-for-employers-2026-to-2027
• Employment Rights Bill milestones (implementation roadmap): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/employment-rights-bill-milestones
• Lewis Silkin, "How the new right to bereavement leave will work", 24 September 2026: https://www.lewissilkin.com/insights/2026/09/24/how-the-new-right-to-bereavement-leave-will-work

This article summarises what the UK government announced on 22 September 2026 and what the published documents say. It is not legal advice; take professional advice for your specific circumstances.