Sick leave, Europe vs US: what a week off sick pays, and what three months pays

By Skyler Bissell · October 20, 2026 · 11 min read

Take a week off sick in the first year of a $150,000 job in Seattle and the law makes your employer pay the whole week, $2,877. Take that week in London, on the salary converted to pounds, and the law guarantees you £123, which is 5.7% of the week. Paris pays €172, because the first three days are unpaid. That runs against almost everything Americans hear about European sick leave, and it is only half the story, because the order flips when the illness lasts three months.

What the law pays for a week off and for three months off

One person on $150,000, converted at the exchange rate in our build, in the first year of a job and past any waiting period for new hires. The week runs Monday to Sunday; three months is thirteen weeks. Each figure is what the statute pays, followed by the share of the salary the same days would have earned.

Engine figures, 2026 rules. The salary is $150,000 in the US cities and $150,000 converted at our build's exchange rate everywhere else (£112,000 in London, €134,000 in the euro cities, SEK 1,487,000 in Stockholm, NOK 1,410,000 in Oslo, CHF 124,000 in Zurich). Statutory floor only: collective agreements and company sick pay are excluded. US sick-leave banks are taken at their full annual balance at a large employer; state disability and paid-leave insurance pays after the bank runs out, with Washington's priced at 50% of wages, below the $1,647 weekly cap this salary would reach, so Seattle's thirteen-week figure is on the low side. Stockholm's week includes the one-time karensavdrag deduction.

Read down the first column and the US cities with sick-leave laws sit beside Berlin and Zurich at the top, while London, Paris, Dublin and Madrid pay a small fraction of the week. Read the second and the picture changes: Berlin, San Francisco, Oslo and Seattle pay half or more of three months' salary, and New York, Paris, London and Dublin fall to the bottom with Austin.

Why the first week in Europe often pays so little

European sick pay is built as insurance against losing your income to a long illness, and several countries keep the cost of short absences down with waiting days, low flat rates or caps that bite on a professional salary.

• London pays Statutory Sick Pay, a flat £123.25 a week for up to 28 weeks. Since 6 April 2026 it starts on the first day of illness, with the old three waiting days gone, per GOV.UK. On this salary that flat sum replaces 5.7% of a week.
• Paris has three jours de carence, unpaid, and then the health insurer pays 50% of a daily wage that is capped at 1.4 times the minimum wage, which Assurance Maladie sets at a maximum of €42.97 a day. The employer's top-up to 90% of pay is a legal right too, but only after a year with the employer, so a first-year worker does not get it.
• Dublin requires five days a year at 70% of pay, capped at €110 a day, after thirteen weeks of service, under the Sick Leave Act 2022 (Citizens Information); the planned rise to seven and then ten days is on hold.
• Madrid leaves the first three days unpaid, then pays 60% of a contribution base capped at €5,101.20 a month until day 20 and 75% after that, according to the Seguridad Social.
• Stockholm pays 80% of salary from the employer for the first fourteen days, less a one-time karensavdrag of 20% of a week's sick pay under the sick pay act (Riksdagen, lag 1991:1047), which brings a one-week illness to 64.0%.
• Amsterdam makes the employer pay 70% of salary for up to two years, capped at 70% of the UWV maximum daily wage, which is €216.94 per working day, or €1,084.69 a week.

Two countries pay the short illness in full. Berlin's employer pays 100% for six weeks under the Continued Remuneration Act once you have worked there for four weeks, and Zurich's pays 100% for three weeks in the first year of service, once you are past the first three months.

Why the American numbers are higher than people expect

There is no federal law that makes a private US employer pay for sick days, and the Department of Labor says so plainly. The federal Family and Medical Leave Act gives job-protected leave for a serious illness, but it is unpaid and only covers you after twelve months with the employer; the details are on whether FMLA is paid or unpaid. What fills the gap is state and city law, and in the three coastal cities on this page it is generous for a short illness.

Seattle's Paid Sick and Safe Time ordinance gives employees of large employers one hour of paid sick time for every 30 hours worked, about 8.7 working days in a full-time year, per the city's Office of Labor Standards. New York City's law requires 56 paid hours, seven days, at employers with 100 or more staff. San Francisco's ordinance also accrues one hour per 30 worked, so about the same 8.7 days in a first year, and lets employers with ten or more staff cap the balance at 72 hours. After the bank runs out, state insurance takes over for a longer illness: Washington's paid medical leave, California's State Disability Insurance at 70% of wages up to $1,765 a week, and New York's disability benefit, which has paid at most $170 a week since 1989. That last figure is why New York drops from the top of the first column to near the bottom of the second.

Austin has none of it. Texas law blocks cities from requiring paid sick leave, so the statutory floor there is nothing for a day or for a year. Nationally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found in March 2026 that 81% of private-industry workers had access to paid sick leave, counting the pooled paid-time-off plans many employers use, so close to a fifth had none from their employer.

One caution about the American banks: they accrue by hours worked. A full year at a large Seattle employer builds about 8.7 days, but a week off in the fourth month of a job finds about three days in the bank, and the 90-day new-hire wait in Seattle and San Francisco means a week off in the first three months finds none. Washington's paid medical leave has its own threshold of 820 hours worked, so a first-year arrival can fall short of it too. The table assumes the full annual balance and a qualifying worker, which flatters the US cities early in a job.

Where Europe pulls ahead: the long illness

The second column is where European sick pay earns its reputation. German Krankengeld pays 70% of salary, capped at €135.63 a day, after the six weeks of full pay, for up to 78 weeks of the same illness in three years, which is why Berlin replaces 66.0% of three months' salary. Norway's NAV pays 100% of salary up to six times the basic amount, NOK 819,294 a year, for up to a year, so Oslo's figure is the same 58.1% whether the illness lasts a week or three months. Sweden's Försäkringskassan pays 80% from day fifteen, capped at SEK 1,259 a day. The Dutch employer keeps paying for two full years.

Even there the caps decide the number at this salary. A Stockholm or Berlin employee on a median salary would replace far more of their pay than the figures here, because the ceilings sit well below $150,000. And San Francisco keeps pace with Berlin over three months, because California's disability insurance cap is high. The countries that pay little for a week also pay little for a quarter: London's flat sum stays at 5.7%, Paris rises only to 11.3%, and Dublin's five days are worth 1.6% of thirteen weeks, because Ireland's state illness benefit needs a record of Irish social insurance contributions that a newcomer does not have.

Sick days and vacation days are separate in Europe

Where no sick-leave law applies, a US employer can run one pool of paid time off that covers both holiday and illness, so a week of flu is a week of vacation gone. EU law keeps the two apart. Under the Working Time Directive, the Court of Justice has held that a worker who falls ill during paid annual leave is entitled to take the leave that coincided with the illness later (CJEU, case C-78/11), and in an earlier case that sickness before scheduled leave does not use it up either. The protection covers at least the four weeks of leave EU law guarantees, in every member state on this page; the UK, Switzerland and Norway set their own rules. A week of flu in Berlin or Paris therefore leaves your holiday where it was. What those days are worth, country by country, is on vacation days by country.

The waiting periods that catch new arrivals

Every figure above assumes you have passed the new-hire wait, and for someone who has just moved that wait is the part of the floor most likely to matter. London, Amsterdam, Stockholm and New York pay from the start of the job. Berlin and Oslo want four weeks of work first, Paris about a month of contributions, Seattle, San Francisco and Dublin about three months, and Zurich three months under an ordinary open-ended contract (the Federal Supreme Court settled that in 2005). Madrid needs 180 days of Spanish social-security contributions within five years, so a newcomer from the US has no statutory sick pay at all for the first six months, while someone moving from another EU country can usually count contributions paid there.

What the floor leaves out

The statute is the minimum, and in much of Europe the contract or the collective agreement sits well above it. British employers commonly pay full salary for a set number of weeks as company sick pay; Dutch collective agreements often raise the first year to 100%; Irish tech employers often top up; Swedish agreements add to the statutory rate. On the US side, many large employers carry short-term disability insurance that replaces part of salary for several months. None of that is guaranteed, which is why it is worth one line in the offer: ask what the company pays when you are sick, from when, and for how long. It belongs on the same sheet as the salary, which the total compensation comparison for a US and a European offer builds line by line, and it is one part of what paid time off is worth.

FAQ

Your own pair is two clicks away: the Seattle to Berlin comparison lists each city's statutory sick pay beside the salary that keeps you even, and the calculator does the same for any two of our 178 cities.

Sources. UK: GOV.UK, Statutory Sick Pay. France: Assurance Maladie, daily allowances for sick leave. Ireland: Citizens Information, sick leave and sick pay. Spain: Seguridad Social, temporary incapacity amount. Sweden: Riksdagen, lag (1991:1047) om sjuklön and Försäkringskassan, current amounts. Netherlands: article 7:629 of the Civil Code and UWV, maximum daily wage. Norway: NAV, sickness benefit. Switzerland: Federal Supreme Court, BGE 131 III 623. United States: US Department of Labor, sick leave, Seattle Office of Labor Standards, Paid Sick and Safe Time and Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employee Benefits in the United States, March 2026. EU case law: Court of Justice of the EU, C-78/11 ANGED. All pages retrieved 19 October 2026. Per-city provenance for every rate, cap and duration is in data/_meta.json, per the methodology.

Figures here come from cityparity's per-city engine and describe the legal floor at publication; caps, rates and waiting rules change, and your contract can pay more than any figure here. Where our comparison pages quote an equivalent salary, it is the bar an offer has to clear in the destination city and it is not a job offer. See the methodology.