The Employment Rights Act had a long and complicated Parliamentary journey which it finally completed on 16 December 2025. It received Royal Assent two days later.
Background
It will be implemented in stages, starting two months after Royal Assent (see below for more information).
Much of the Act is devoted to amending employment rights as its name suggests. If you expand the headings below you can find more information about these measures arranged by topic,
The rest of the Act covers topics outside the scope of this briefing, including significant amendments to trade union rights, establishing a new framework for collective bargaining in some sectors and providing the framework for creating of a single body to enforce core employment rights.
Where known, we have indicated when each group of measures is likely to take effect.
What is the current position?
The Act as originally drafted would have abolished the two year qualifying period for unfair dismissal and introduced a new framework for a lighter touch unfair dismissal regime during an “initial period of employment”.
These measures encountered considerable opposition in the House of Lords. To help secure the passage of the Act through Parliament, the government agreed to withdraw these measures and instead reduce the qualifying period for unfair dismissal rights from two years to six months. However, in exchange for this concession it decided to remove the cap on the compensatory award, meaning employers’ liability for breach of unfair dismissal legislation will become unlimited.
These measures are likely to come into effect on 1 January 2027.
What’s in the Act?
There are three groups of measures to protect zero-hours workers:
- The right to guaranteed hours after the end of every reference period, which reflects the hours worked during that period
- The right to reasonable notice of shifts (including change and cancellation)
- The right to payment for cancelled, moved and curtailed shifts where sufficient notice has not been given
Similar rights will be extended to agency workers via a new schedule which was inserted in the Act at report stage in the House of Commons.
- Also at report stage, the government introduced provisions which would make it possible for employers and workers to agree to modify the application of these provisions via a collective agreement.
Similar – but less extensive - provisions in the Workers (Predictable Terms and Conditions) Act 2023 (which have not been brought into effect) will be repealed.
What will be in secondary legislation?
Regulations will define the reference period for guaranteed hours and other conditions of entitlement as well as the procedural requirements around the offer of a new contract.
In relation to reasonable notice of shifts, regulations will specify minimum notice periods.
In relation to the right to payment for cancelled shifts, regulations will specify the amount of notice required, the compensation due and when it must be paid.
Consultation on these regulations is expected shortly and the government is currently planning to bring these measures into effect during 2027.
What’s in the Bill?
The Act provides that an employer may only refuse a flexible working request if it considers that a specified ground applies and if it is reasonable to refuse the request on that ground. The specified grounds remain the same as the current legislation.
The Act also adds a requirement to state the ground or grounds for refusing the application and explain why the employer considers that decision is reasonable.
What will be in secondary legislation?
Nothing – all the relevant provisions are in the Act. However, the Act introduces a new power to make regulations which specify the steps an employer must take when consulting with the employee before rejecting a claim – a requirement that was inserted into existing flexible working legislation with effect from April 2024.
The government is currently planning to bring these measures into effect during 2027.
What’s in the Act?
Key measures include:
- Removing the qualifying period for parental leave and paternity leave
- Introducing the ability to take paternity leave after shared parental leave
- Creating a new, broader right to bereavement leave which will replace parental bereavement leave and will extend to early pregnancy loss
What will be in secondary legislation?
The qualifying relationships for bereavement leave will be specified in regulations.
The Act will also create a new power to make regulations which will extend the current protection of pregnant women and new parents from dismissal on redundancy grounds to dismissal for other reasons.
Consultation on the content of both sets of regulations launched in October 2025 and will close on 15 January 2026.
What’s in the Act?
It will become automatically unfair to dismiss an employee for not agreeing to a “restricted variation” to their contract or if the employer dismisses the employee to replace, or to re-engage them on varied contractual terms which would have amounted to a restricted variation. Restricted variations are defined in the Act, and include variations which reduce pay or benefits.
There is an exception if the employer can show the reason for the variation was to “eliminate, prevent, significantly reduce or significantly mitigate the effects of financial difficulties which, at the time of the dismissal, were affecting the employer’s ability to carry on the business as a going concern” and could not reasonably have avoided the need to make the variation. A slightly different formulation applies to public sector employers.
Similar rules will apply if an employee is dismissed to make way for non-employees to cover their work.
Even if the dismissal is not automatically unfair, the tribunal will still need to consider whether the dismissal was fair under the normal rules, taking into account a non-exhaustive list of factors set out in the Act. These include whether any consultation was carried out by the employer with the employee, an independent trade union or another employee representative organisation about the variation of the employee’s contract of employment, and whether the employer offered the employee anything in return for agreeing to a variation.
What will be in secondary legislation?
There is power to make regulations to specify other factors that must be taken into account when assessing the fairness of a dismissal in this context.
Consultation on these regulations is expected shortly and the government is currently planning to bring these measures into effect in October 2026.
What’s in the Act?
The duty imposed on employers to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of their workers in the course of their employment will be strengthened by adding “all” before “reasonable”.
The Act also inserts sexual harassment into the list of relevant failures in relation to disclosures that qualify for protection under whistleblowing legislation.
The Act also re-introduces protection against third party harassment (of all kinds) into the Equality Act. An employer will be liable for third party harassment where an employee is harassed in the course of their employment, and it is shown that the employer failed to take all reasonable steps to prevent the third party from harassing them.
What will be in secondary legislation?
The Act confers power to make regulations to specify steps which employers must take and matters to which they must have regard to meet the obligation to take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment. The regulations may set out a non-exhaustive list of obligations that are to be regarded as reasonable steps an employer must take in order to prevent workplace sexual harassment.
The government currently plans to implement the substantive measures in October 2026, but the regulations specifying the steps that are to be regarded as reasonable won’t be implemented until 2027.
What’s in the Act?
The three-day waiting period to qualify for statutory sick pay will be removed. This means that eligibility for SSP can arise where a person is incapable of work for a single day or longer, as opposed to the current requirement for there to be 4 consecutive days of incapacity.
In addition, the Lower Earnings Limit will be removed. Once these changes take effect, SSP will be paid at 80% of average weekly earnings or the current flat rate, whichever is lower.
These measures are due to take effect in April 2026.
What’s in the Act?
Currently the numerical threshold for triggering collective consultation requirements is calculated per “establishment”. The government originally planned to amend the relevant legislation so that counting proposed redundancies for this purpose would be done across the employer’s entire business, even if it's operating from multiple locations.
The government has now re-thought its position, and has decided that it would be better to define the threshold for multi-site redundancies in regulations, which would provide a more flexible way of calculating the threshold in this situation. The necessary regulation-making power has therefore been added to the Act. The threshold of 20 for single site redundancies has been re-instated.
The government has also introduced amendments to the Act to double the protected period where there has been a breach of collective consultation requirements, from 90 to 180 days. However, it has dropped plans to introduce the remedy of interim relief in these circumstances.
The doubling of the protective award is due to take effect in April 2026, but the government does not plan to introduce the new threshold measures until 2027.
What’s in the Bill?
The Act will require employers which are subject to the gender pay gap reporting requirements to publish an equality action plan alongside the information they are already required to publish. This includes their plans to address the gender pay gap and to support employees going through the menopause.
What will be in secondary legislation?
Details of what will be required by way of an equality action plan will be set out in regulations.