Compulsory sickness insurance from parallel employment relationships with multiple employers establishes only one continuous sickness insurance for the purposes of assessing the occurrence of the claim and calculating the amount of the sickness benefit

On September 30, 2025, the Supreme Administrative Court of the Slovak Republic, by judgment 7Ssk/38/2025, dismissed the cassation complaint of the complainant against the negative decision of the Administrative Court in Banská Bystrica in the matter of determining the amount of sickness benefit for an employee from multiple parallel employment relationships. The Court of Cassation stated that for an insured person who was compulsorily insured for sickness as an employee on the date of temporary incapacity for work on the basis of two parallel employment relationships, this is one continuous insurance.

The applicant for sickness benefits (the complainant) was insured for sickness benefits as a self-employed person (hereinafter referred to as the “SZČO”) and later in parallel as an employee successively with two employers. As of the date of the onset of incapacity for work, the period of sickness insurance with the second employer was less than 90 days. After the onset of incapacity for work, the applicant claimed sickness benefits from three sickness insurances. The Social Insurance Company determined the amount of sickness benefits from the sum of the daily assessment bases of the SZČO, from the sickness insurance with the first employer and from the probable daily assessment base in the case of the second employer. The applicant filed an administrative action against the decisions of the Social Insurance Company, arguing that the amount of sickness benefits in his case was not calculated correctly. The Administrative Court in Banská Bystrica dismissed the applicant’s administrative action.

The Court of Cassation, resolving the issue of the entitlement to sick pay in the case of an employee’s sick pay insurance with several employers, referred to its previous decision-making activity. It pointed to the purpose of sick pay insurance resulting from the current legislation, which does not define sick pay insurance as insurance for the event of loss or reduction of income from one legal relationship (employee). On the contrary, sick pay insurance aims to cover the loss or reduction of income in general, i.e. from gainful activity as such. The purpose of sick pay insurance is therefore to protect a person in the position of an employee and not to protect the specific legal relationship in which this person is.

Therefore, in the opinion of the Court of Cassation, as long as the insured person remains an employee in at least one legal relationship, he is compulsorily insured for sickness, while all actual days of insurance are included in the period of ongoing sickness insurance (in the event of overlapping individual employment relationships, the day of insurance is counted only once). Such an interpretation respects the principle of merit in sickness insurance, according to which the benefit within the framework of a statutory benefit scheme should consider as closely as possible the assessment basis of the insured person in the relevant qualifying period.

In the opinion of the Court of Cassation, therefore, applying the above to the case of the complainant, in the event of the complainant’s second employment relationship, no separate sickness insurance was established. The complainant is entitled to one sickness benefit from the sickness insurance with both employers. Since in this case the complainant’s sickness insurance lasted continuously for the entire year 2021 until the reason for the provision of sick leave arose at the end of 2022, the decisive period for the calculation of the daily assessment base was the year 2021. The daily assessment base should have been determined as the ratio of the sum of the assessment bases in the decisive period and the number of days of the decisive period. The assessment base in 2022 (including that derived from the second employment relationship) is not used for the purposes of calculating the sickness benefit.

The Court of Cassation therefore concluded that in the case at hand it was unnecessary to calculate the probable daily assessment base from the assessment bases of the complainant achieved with the second employer in 2022. Since the Social Insurance Agency took it into account, it incorrectly determined a higher amount of sick pay than the complainant was entitled to. However, the incorrect legal assessment did not negatively affect any of the complaints’ rights; the sick pay benefit was awarded to him, even to a higher extent than it was due. The Court of Cassation therefore dismissed the complainant’s cassation appeal as unfounded.

This decision was adopted by the Panel of the Supreme Administrative Court unanimously, and no appeal is admissible against it.

This decision was made by Panel No. 7 of the Supreme Administrative Court, composed of: President of the Panel JUDr. Jana Martinčeková, Judges Mgr. Michal Novotný and JUDr. Martin Tiso.