Unpaid carer's leave in the UK: how to take it

Key Takeaways

Unpaid carer's leave is a day-one week, in any 12 months, for employees in England, Scotland and Wales. You can take half days. You name the dates. You do not hand over a GP letter.

Spend the week arranging care. Do not spend it being the 7.45 rota. The rota needs a different person.

What is unpaid carer's leave?

Unpaid carer's leave is time off work, without pay, to give or arrange care for a dependant with a long-term need. GOV.UK lists three tests. An illness or injury expected to need care for more than three months. A disability under the Equality Act 2010. Care needs because of old age.

The dependant does not have to be a relative. A neighbour who relies on you counts. A parent counts. You get the leave from your first day in the job. Holidays and the right to return to the same job keep accruing.

A week means the hours you usually work over seven days. Three days a week, three days of leave. Acas is the page HR will open. The law is the Carer's Leave Act 2023. It started on 6 April 2024. Northern Ireland is a different set of rules.

How to take unpaid carer's leave

Tell your employer you are taking carer's leave to give or arrange care for a dependant with a long-term need, and name the days or half days. That is the whole request.

It does not have to be in writing. Send the email anyway. Dated, four lines, sitting in sent mail.

Minimum notice, from Acas:

• half a day or one day: three days' notice
• two days: four
• three days: six
• four days: eight
• a five-day week: ten

The notice has to be in full days, even if you are taking a Tuesday afternoon. They cannot ask for evidence of the care need. They cannot refuse it.

They can postpone it if your absence would seriously disrupt the organisation. If they do, they must agree another date within a month of the one you asked for, and write to you within seven days of the original request, before the leave was due to start, with the reason and the new date.

If the shower is this morning and nobody else can do it, that is time off for dependants, not this leave. Different right. Usually unpaid. No set number of days. Use carer's leave for the appointment you already knew was coming.

The January holiday chart

Every January the annual leave grid looks generous. By the second week of March, in a lot of teams I talk to, it has already been spent on GP slots, a discharge that was meant to be 11am and landed at 4, and one "quick" chemist run that was not quick. Nobody files that as caring. It just shows as holiday.

Paid, unpaid, and a review that already closed

The statutory week is unpaid. Some employers pay some of it. Check the handbook before you price a full week's lost wages. If they offer three paid days, you can still take the rest of the statutory week unpaid. Carers UK is plain on that.

The Centre for Care at the University of Sheffield, writing with Carers UK in July 2026, said unpaid time off is, for people in low-income jobs, a fast track to hardship they already have. Carers UK modelling, quoted there, put five paid days at £5.5 million to £32 million a year.

The Make Work Pay consultation closed on 1 September 2026. Paid leave was on the table. So was a longer unpaid block. None of that is the law this Monday. The review is due to report in winter 2026 to 2027.

I do not know whether a paid week will exist this Parliament. I would not wait for the PDF before sending the email.

What to spend the week on

Amina is 46. Payroll, an Enfield office. Mum is 81, Palmers Green, an 18-minute bus. The gap is 12.30, lunchtime tablets that now need prompting, not a 7.45 shower.

She cannot take five unpaid days. Rent is already tight. She booked two Tuesday afternoons, three days' notice each time, both labelled carer's leave, arranging care for a dependant. She did not write mum.

First Tuesday: care needs assessment with Enfield. She asked for a carer's assessment for herself on the same call. They talked through lunch, the chemist, the tablets already prescribed.

Second Tuesday: two introductions. One video at 12.15. One in the flat at 4. Same person, 12.15 to 13.45, Monday to Friday. She stayed for the first visit the following week on a half day.

The job kept the mornings. The lunch slot has a name. She still does Sundays.

The NHS still puts help at home from a paid carer at about £15 to £30 an hour. Five lunchtime visits at £28 is about £7,280 a year. Hourly rates in 2026 wander by borough. That is usually less than dropping a day.

If the diary problem is a later start rather than a named visit, flexible working for carers is the request that keeps the salary. If the hard part is saying the word, talking to your employer about caring is the disclosure version. For the council date and the introductions in one week, arranging home care while working is the diary. This page is the leave.

Why so few people take it

CIPD's 2025 flexible and hybrid working survey found 52% of organisations had a policy or procedure for carer's leave. 29% did not. 19% did not know. In firms with fewer than 250 staff, only 33% had one. Since April 2024, 15% of employers had seen more requests for time off to manage caring.

Employers for Carers, in a January 2026 survey of 117 organisations, found 61% monitor how much carer's leave is taken. Among those who could give a figure, the most common answer was that 0 to 5% of carers were using the entitlement.

A right that costs a week's pay does not show up as a spike on an HR dashboard.

DWP's March 2025 analysis, using 2022 figures, put around 544,000 working-age unpaid carers out of work because caring stopped them working, at £37 billion of lost output. That is people who have already left. It does not count Amina's two Tuesday afternoons.

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How Match with Care can help

The second Tuesday is quieter if there is already a shortlist.

Match with Care is a managed introductory care marketplace. We interview carers, check enhanced DBS, right to work, and references, then show you profiles so your parent can meet someone before they have a key. We are not a traditional domiciliary care agency, and we are not CQC-registered as a care provider. Introductory matching does not work that way.

What we can do is keep the first ask small: weekday lunches, or two morning visits, often around 20 to 30 per cent below typical agency quotes, with a care advisor if the match is wrong. Hours go in the app. You get a weekly invoice. You send the four-line email with a rota behind it.

If you want to talk through the slot without putting your parent or your manager on the line, call +44 7962 657635 or email hello@matchwithcare.com.