Unauthorised absence starts the same way in most small businesses. An employee does not arrive. Nobody knows why. The phone rings out, the shift gets covered, and by mid-morning somebody says the dangerous words: they have obviously quit. 

In law, they have not. The contract carries on until it is properly ended. What you do in the next five working days decides who ends it, and on whose terms. This article covers what counts as unauthorised absence, the first steps when someone fails to attend, when you can stop pay, and how a dismissal survives scrutiny if it comes to that. 

What counts as unauthorised absence? 

Unauthorised absence is absence from work without permission and without a reason your business accepts. There is no single statutory definition. The line is drawn by the employment contract and your absence policy, not by an Act of Parliament. That is why two employers can treat the same no-show differently and both be within their rights. 

The practical test has two parts. Did the employee have permission to be away? Have they given a reason your policy recognises? If the answer to both is no, the absence is unauthorised. 

Unauthorised absence versus sickness and authorised leave 

Sickness reported under your sickness rules is authorised absence. It may be inconvenient. It is not misconduct. Approved holiday, jury service, and emergency time off for dependants all sit on the authorised side too. 

The difficult cases live in the gap. An employee who is off sick and has not called in has broken your reporting procedure, and the underlying illness may still be genuine. The distinction matters more than it looks. The failure to report is the conduct issue. The sickness itself is not. Sanction someone for being ill, rather than for staying silent, and you hand them an appeal you will lose, with a possible discrimination claim behind it. 

The common examples: AWOL, overstayed holiday and no-shows 

The patterns repeat across every sector. An employee stops attending and stops answering, the classic AWOL case. A late return from holiday, often with a story about flights or family abroad. Walking out mid-shift after a disagreement. Not returning on the agreed date after parental leave. Disappearing the day after a difficult meeting. 

Each one is a different risk. The overstayed holiday deserves particular care. If the delay traces back to a family obligation abroad or a medical emergency, a hard-line response can shade into discrimination territory. Establish the facts before you reach for the disciplinary policy. The facts decide which process you are in. 

Why unauthorised absence is a risk, not only a nuisance 

The cost you never see on a payslip 

The visible cost is a day of lost work. The real cost is wider. Cover has to be arranged at short notice, often at overtime rates. Deadlines slip. And the rest of the team watches how you respond. Ignore one person's no-shows and every reliable employee quietly recalibrates what attendance means in your business. 

Inconsistency carries a legal price as well as a cultural one. If one employee's unexplained Friday was waved through in March and another's was punished in June, the second employee has the beginnings of an unfair treatment argument. Tribunals compare like with like. So do employees. 

An AWOL employee has not resigned 

Here is the most expensive mistake in this whole subject, and it happens in good businesses every month. An employee goes silent. The owner decides the silence speaks for itself, records them as a leaver, and moves on. 

In law, resignation needs a clear decision to leave, communicated to the employer. Silence is not that. Absence is not that. The contract continues until one side lawfully ends it. So when you process the paperwork, issue the P45 and stop responding, you have not accepted a resignation. You have dismissed them. No procedure, no hearing, no appeal, and now, no defence. A "deemed resignation" of an AWOL employee routinely becomes an unfair dismissal claim, with a wrongful dismissal claim for the notice pay riding alongside it. 

The practical rule is blunt. Never mark an absent employee as a leaver because you assume they have gone. Payroll actions read as termination. If the employment is going to end, end it properly, through a process you control and can evidence. 

Your first steps when an employee fails to attend 

Make contact, and record every attempt 

A failure to attend work is a fact-finding problem before it is a disciplinary one. The absence may be a hospital admission, a mental health crisis, an arrest, or a family emergency. Opening with concern is right twice over. It is the decent response, and it reads well in a hearing bundle eighteen months later. 

A sensible sequence looks like this. 

1. Day one: phone at the normal start time. Follow with a text or email asking them to make contact. Note the time of each attempt. 
2. Day two: try again on every channel you hold, and contact the emergency contact if you have one, framed as a welfare check. 
3. Day three to five: send a letter or email instructing the employee to make contact by a stated date, inviting them to explain the absence, and stating plainly that unexplained absence is being treated as unauthorised, that pay is affected, and that the matter may proceed to a disciplinary process. 

Keep a log of all of it. Date, time, channel, what was said or left as a message. This log is the first document a tribunal asks about in an absence case. Attempts you cannot evidence carry no weight. In a hearing, contact you did not record did not happen. 

Two restraints protect you while the facts are unknown. Keep the tone of every message open, so an employee in genuine crisis can come back without a fight. And say nothing final to anyone else. Announcing to the team or to customers that the person has left, before the contract is ended, is evidence that you treated the employment as over. If a dispute follows, those words get read back to you. 

What your contract and policy should already say 

The strength of your position on day one is set by documents written long before. A workable absence framework covers five things. 

1. Who the employee must notify, by what time, and by what method. 
2. That unexplained absence is treated as unauthorised and unpaid. 
3. That unauthorised absence is a disciplinary matter, up to and including dismissal. 
4. An emergency contact for each employee, with permission to use it. 
5. What happens on repeat incidents, so escalation follows a rule, not a mood. 

If your contracts and policy say none of this, the current absence is still manageable, and the gap is the more urgent finding. Every step gets slower and more arguable when the paperwork is silent. A policy written this month costs an hour. The same wording, needed mid-dispute, cannot be backdated. 

Can you stop pay for unauthorised absence? 

When withholding pay is lawful 

Wages are earned by working, or by being ready and willing to work. An employee who is absent without permission and without good reason is neither. Withholding pay for genuinely unauthorised days is generally lawful, and most contracts and policies say so in terms. 

Two conditions keep it safe. The deduction must match the actual absence, not a round number or an added penalty. And the position should be flagged to the employee in writing at the time, which the day three letter above already does. The rules on deductions sit in the Employment Rights Act 1996, and a deduction that overreaches becomes the employee's claim rather than your remedy. 

When stopping pay becomes the claim 

Now the trap. If the absence later turns out to be sickness, the days may attract Statutory Sick Pay, currently £123.25 a week or 80 per cent of normal weekly earnings, whichever is lower, for up to 28 weeks. If the reason turns out to be disability-related, pregnancy-related, or a dependant emergency, pay stopped in anger can convert into an unlawful deduction claim with a discrimination claim attached. The deduction is small money. The claim it seeds is not. 

The operating rule: stop pay once the facts support it, not as a same-day reflex. A deduction can be processed a week later with no loss. An allegation of discriminatory treatment cannot be unwound at all. 

One more consequence of the contract continuing: statutory holiday keeps accruing while the employment lasts, paid or not. An absent employee you have not dismissed is still building leave that must be paid out if the employment ends later. It is another quiet reason to resolve these cases through a process, at a pace you set, rather than letting them drift for months. 

And if ill health is the real story, conduct is the wrong lens altogether. That path runs through a capability procedure, with medical evidence and reasonable adjustments considered before any decision. Forcing a health case through a misconduct process is one of the fastest routes to a finding of unfairness. 

The fair procedure that must come before any sanction 

Why the ACAS Code applies 

Once an unauthorised absence heads toward a warning or dismissal, the ACAS Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures sets the minimum standard, and tribunals must take it into account. That is the position in England, Scotland and Wales. In Northern Ireland the Labour Relations Agency Code of Practice performs the same role, with its own uplift rules. An unreasonable failure to follow the Code lets a tribunal increase an award by up to 25 per cent under section 207A of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992. On a £10,000 award, that is £2,500 added for skipping steps that cost nothing to follow. 

Investigation, hearing and appeal, even for an empty chair 

The shape is the same as any conduct case. Investigate first: gather the contact log, the policy, the rota, and any explanation offered. Invite the employee in writing to a disciplinary meeting, with the allegation stated and the possible outcomes named. Respect the right to be accompanied. Decide on the evidence, confirm the outcome in writing, and offer an appeal. 

Two absence-specific wrinkles matter. First, the employee may never engage. You can proceed to a decision in their absence, and it will hold, provided the invitations were clear, repeated, and documented, and the letters warned that the meeting would go ahead without them. Silence does not stall the process. It only changes the evidence the decision rests on. 

Second, the employee may respond with a grievance about how the matter has been handled. That is a legal process in its own right, not a delaying tactic to be brushed aside. Handle it through your formal grievance procedure, either before the disciplinary continues or in parallel with clear separation. Mishandling the grievance mid-process is how a defensible absence case grows a second claim. 

When unauthorised absence can lead to dismissal 

A pattern, or one serious incident 

Most unauthorised absence dismissals are built on repetition. A first incident draws a warning. Further incidents escalate through your disciplinary stages to dismissal with notice. Each step is documented, each sanction proportionate. That structure is dull, and dull is what wins at tribunal. 

A single incident can justify summary dismissal only where it amounts to a fundamental breach of contract. Walking off site and leaving vulnerable customers unsupervised might reach that bar. An unexplained Tuesday does not. Unauthorised absence is not automatic gross misconduct, whatever the policy wording says. Severity, context and a fair process decide the outcome, not the label. Treat "gross misconduct" in your policy as a possibility to be proven, never a shortcut to skip the hearing. 

The shrinking shield, and the file that decides the case 

Ordinary unfair dismissal protection currently requires a qualifying period of two years' service. From 1 January 2027, GOV.UK confirms most employees will be able to claim after six months. In Northern Ireland the qualifying period is usually one year, and the January 2027 change does not apply there. The short-service AWOL dismissal handled without process, which felt safe for years, is about to stop being safe. Build the procedure habit now, while the stakes are lower. And remember the qualifying period has never protected against discrimination claims or automatically unfair reasons, which run from day one. 

When the case does reach a tribunal, the decision usually turns on the file, not the facts. An employer can be entirely right that the absence was unauthorised and still lose, because the contact log was never kept, the invitation letters were never sent, or the notes were written up after the event. Contemporaneous records are the whole game. A fair decision with a thin file loses to a documented process almost every time. 

Two edge cases deserve a line each. Frustration of contract, where events like a long prison sentence make performance impossible, is a narrow doctrine that ends employment without dismissal. Tribunals apply it reluctantly. Do not assume it applies to your situation without advice. And where an absence case ends employment for a reason that is neither conduct nor capability, it may fall under some other substantial reason, which carries its own fairness test. 

Building an unauthorised absence procedure that holds up 

Triggers, return-to-work conversations and consistency 

A working unauthorised absence procedure has three moving parts. Clear reporting rules, so everyone knows what "calling in" means. Defined trigger points, so formal review starts by rule rather than by mood. And a short, documented return-to-work conversation after every unexplained absence, which surfaces real reasons early and signals that attendance is noticed. 

The return-to-work conversation needs ten minutes and three questions. What happened? Is there anything behind it the business should know about? What needs to change so it does not repeat? Write the answers down and both of you sign the note. Those two lines of record do more for a future case than any policy paragraph, and more often they prevent the future case entirely, because problems named early tend to get fixed early. 

A note on the Bradford Factor, which many SMEs use as a trigger tool. It is a management aid, not a legal test. It carries no status at tribunal, and a sanction that cites a score and nothing else will not survive scrutiny. Let it prompt a conversation. Never let it replace one. The same warning applies to any automated absence flag in your HR software. 

Consistency is the quiet discipline that holds the whole structure up. Same facts, same response, whichever manager is handling it and whoever the employee is. Most discrimination arguments in absence cases are built from comparisons between how two people were treated, not from anything anyone said. 

The steps never to handle alone 

Three moments in an absence case concentrate almost all of the risk: the decision to dismiss, the appeal outcome, and any case where the explanation touches health, disability, pregnancy or another protected characteristic. The letters are easy to write. The judgement inside them is where cases are lost. Those three are worth a second opinion every time, because they are the points a tribunal reads first and the hardest to repair afterwards. 

Where does your absence process stand today? 

Most owners discover the state of their absence paperwork in the week they need it, which is the most expensive week to find out. The free HR Health Check lets you know where your HR stands in under one minute, with a Red, Amber or Green rating across the areas a tribunal would test first, contracts and absence rules included. Take the HR Health Check before the next empty chair, and the panic never starts.