Stopping work

You may decide to stop working when you are diagnosed with cancer. You may want to focus on treatment and time with family or friends. You might be worried about coping with this change. But you may find it gives you more time to do things that are important to you.

Try to let family or friends know if you are dealing with difficult feelings about giving up work. You may find it helpful to talk to a professional counsellor. You can ask your GP or nurse about this.

Before you decide to stop working, you may need to think about how it will affect your finances. When you give up work, you lose any employment rights you might have had. These include:

• occupational sick pay
• death in service benefit
• Statutory Sick Pay
• pension rights
• any private medical insurance linked with your employer.

If a partner or family member takes time off work to look after you, they may be entitled to compassionate or unpaid leave.

We have more information about working while caring for someone with cancer and employment rights at work as a carer.

You may be able to get an early payment from your pension because of ill health. This depends on the rules of your pension scheme.

If you qualify for ill-health early retirement, your pension scheme will tell you what your options are. You can also find out more from the Money and Pension Service on 0115 965 9570 or by visiting moneyandpensionsservice.org.uk.

You can also get advice from an independent financial adviser. Getting the right advice may help you get a higher income from your pension.

These are some things to think about:

• If you access a workplace or private pension due to ill health, you may get a bigger annual income or lump sum compared to someone who retires early while medically fit to work.
• People who are expected to live for less than 12 months may be able to take their whole pension as a tax-free lump sum. There is more information about this at gov.uk
• Some pension schemes may not allow you to retire early if you are fit to work. Make sure you check your policy.

It is important to think about your own situation before making any decisions. For example, you might need to decide between taking a:

• large lump-sum payment plus a small monthly income
• small lump-sum payment plus a large monthly income.

It is important to think about any benefits you are claiming. For example, Employment and Support Allowance may be reduced if you get payments of more than a certain amount each week from a pension.

If you are expected to live for less than 12 months and you are aged under 75, you may be able to retire because of serious ill health. You may be entitled to the whole of your pension as a one-off lump sum.  

The whole sum will usually be tax-free. A registered medical professional must give evidence to the scheme administrator that your life expectancy is less than a year.  

Any money you take from your pension and do not spend or give away before you die, will become part of your estate. Your estate is the money and property you leave behind when you die.

It is common to have many different emotions when you are told you have cancer. These can be difficult to cope with. We have more information about cancer and your emotions.

We want everyone affected by cancer to feel our information is written for them.

We want our information to be as clear as possible. To do this, we try to:

• use plain English
• explain medical words
• use short sentences
• use illustrations to explain text
• structure the information clearly
• make sure important points are clear.

We use gender-inclusive language and talk to our readers as ‘you’ so that everyone feels included. Where clinically necessary we use the terms ‘men’ and ‘women’ or ‘male’ and ‘female’. For example, we do so when talking about parts of the body or mentioning statistics or research about who is affected.

You can read more about how we produce our information here.