New statutory right to bereavement leave

Employees who lose a close relative, and women and partners who experience pregnancy loss before 24 weeks, will gain a legal right to time off work from April 2027, the government confirmed on 22 September.

Ministers will introduce a new statutory right to bereavement leave for employees who lose a spouse or partner, a parent, an adult child or a sibling. The right will also cover step, half, adoptive, kinship-care and foster relationships, groups that currently have no legal entitlement to bereavement leave. The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade said the change is intended to bring the law into line with how families are actually formed, and to stop people having to negotiate time off at the hardest moment of their lives.

Separately, women and their partners who experience any pregnancy loss before 24 weeks — including miscarriage, termination and unsuccessful IVF embryo transfer — will be entitled to up to two weeks of unpaid leave. The entitlement will extend to partners, the other biological parent, and intended parents in a surrogacy arrangement. Officials said the measure recognises that pregnancy loss affects the whole family, not only the person who was pregnant.

There is currently no legal right to leave in these circumstances, even though an estimated one in five women in the UK experience a miscarriage during their lifetime. Parents who have a stillbirth after 24 weeks, or who lose a child under 18, already have a right to parental bereavement leave. The new rules sit alongside that existing protection rather than replacing it.

Kate Dearden, minister for the future of work, said no one should have to fight for time to grieve. “These changes back people going through some of the hardest moments of life, whoever they are and wherever they work,” she said, thanking campaigners whose testimonies had driven the reform. The government said most employers already offer compassionate leave, often paid and more generous than the new minimum, but that a legal floor was needed where discretion fails. It said it would keep working with businesses as the measures are introduced.

Vicki Robinson, chief executive of Miscarriage UK, welcomed the announcement as an important step in treating pregnancy loss as a bereavement, and said the two-week minimum and the inclusion of partners should give employers a baseline to go beyond. She said the charity still believes the leave should be paid, and will keep pressing for that through its Leave for Every Loss campaign.

Matthew Percival, the CBI’s future of work and skills director, said a day-one right to bereavement leave recognised the need for time and space at difficult moments. Many employers already provide compassionate leave, he said, and businesses want to work with government, unions and others so the detail and guidance work in practice.

The leave may be taken flexibly within 56 weeks of the loss, including as single days rather than one block. In the first eight weeks, employees need only tell their employer as soon as is reasonably practicable, not in advance. No one will be required to produce evidence of the loss. Employees who take the leave will be protected from detriment or dismissal for using the right.

The changes will be made by secondary legislation next year and take effect in April 2027. They follow a consultation in which more than eight in ten employers, and nine in ten business representative organisations, backed bereavement leave after the death of an immediate family member. The measures form part of the government’s Make Work Pay programme. A wider review of parental leave and pay, including “Hugh’s Law” and the rights of parents of terminally ill children, is still under way.