Employees continue to receive their wages from their employer in the event of illness. Continued payment of wages ends if the illness lasts for more than 42 days within a period of 180 days. This period applies per illness in the period under consideration. If there are several periods of incapacity for work, these are combined if they are causally related.
However, as the employer does not know the medical diagnosis, they must check with the respective health insurance fund. This is time-consuming, especially if the employees of a medium-sized or large company are insured with 20 or more health insurance funds. This is where our customers who already access the eAU via ZEUS® Workforce Management benefit. With an extension of the eAU retrieval (electronic certificate of incapacity for work), employers will also be able to use ZEUS® to check the entitlement to continued payment of wages with the health insurance fund via the GKV server from 1 April 2026. If this entitlement to continued payment of wages expires due to a causal connection between the illness and exceeding the 42-day period, the employee receives compensation payments (sick pay) from their health insurance fund.
ZEUS® significantly simplifies and automates this process
ZEUS® automatically reminds you as soon as the 42nd sick day within 180 days is reached. This function ensures that no deadlines are missed and that you are always informed in good time. The system takes care of time-critical monitoring and relieves you of the burden of manual checks. In addition, a request can be made directly from ZEUS®, which is sent to the responsible health insurance fund via the GKV server. This eliminates the need for our customers to make tedious phone calls or contact the health insurance fund manually. You benefit from seamless communication between your company and the health insurance fund, which significantly reduces the administrative burden.
Another deadline concerns the ‘transfer’ of income replacement benefits from the health insurance companies to the employment office, e.g. for rehabilitation measures or unemployment benefits in the event of incapacity to work. At the end of the sick pay period, employers must deregister the employment relationship under social security law. Here, too, ZEUS® supports you by notifying your HR staff so that nothing is forgotten.
With ZEUS®, you can increase the efficiency of your personnel administration and improve security when dealing with continued salary payments. This saves you valuable time and minimises sources of error. ZEUS® makes continued salary payment queries simple, reliable and efficient – so you can concentrate on what's important.
